


Return to Sender

by aileenrose



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accountant Castiel, Angst, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2015, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Heart Transplant, M/M, Mechanic Dean Winchester, Minor Character Death, Road Trips, Slow Build, Switch Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 04:28:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4990207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aileenrose/pseuds/aileenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's going to let Cas do this thing for him--he's going to let Cas make him so fucking happy." In the first year after Dean loses his brother, Jess comes up with an idea. She wants to meet Cas Novak, the man who has Sam Winchester's heart in his chest. </p><p>art by the incredible meerkt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

Part I

_July 8th, 2012_

_Okay, take two._

_You don’t need to send me ten pages signed with a kiss or anything but it would be nice to know if you’re alive. Did you think Dad put me up to that letter?  Some weird plot to get you back under his thumb? Because he didn’t. It was my idea to write you, and he doesn’t even know that I did. Also, I don’t even think Dad’s mad anymore, not really. And if you still don’t want to talk to him, fine._

_Or maybe you’re thinking that there’s no way I really wrote that first letter anyways cause it was all sappy and emotional. But I did write it. And I meant it._

_Just throw me a line here, Sammy. I know it’s been a long time._

_I’m not mad anymore, either._

_Dean_

**

October—Four Months Ago

It is a night for sudden changes.

The midnight quiet of the house at Greydove Lane is broken by the shrill of a phone ringing. The man in the dark bedroom there fumbles around for his cell phone, bringing it up to his ear.

“Hello?” he mumbles. A professional voice on the other end starts talking rapidly. The covers slide off his shoulder as he sits up—too fast, he winces and rubs his hand into his chest. “I—” he says. Suddenly it seems like the caller is speaking from a far, far distance away. “What do I need to do?”

Two hours away, an OR has just been prepped for surgery. The surgeon is carefully washing up. The body on the operating table is hooked up to a blood pressure monitor, to an EKG, to a ventilator that pushes the breath in and out of his lungs. Besides the two scrub nurses and the technician and the surgeon’s assistant, there is also an anesthesiologist, although her only job is to monitor and nothing more. The body is past pain.

Outside the hospital, Dean Winchester can’t find his car. It’s dark and all the rows look alike. His vision seems to be closing in. He takes another few steps and then his legs give out, folding bonelessly away beneath him. He slides down the side of a car. Someone is calling for him, but he can’t seem to get enough air to call back. And then, suddenly, he finds he _can_ make sound—and that’s how Jess finds him, fist pressed against his mouth, trying to stifle the awful noises he can’t seem to stop.

“Dean,” she says. She doesn’t say anything else. She slides down next to him and then, after a few seconds, her fingers come down tight and bruising around Dean’s free hand.  He doesn’t know how long they sit like that—hours, maybe. Overhead, the air thrums with the sounds of a helicopter’s blades starting up. They tilt their heads back and watch the dark shape of it lift off the roof of the hospital. For a brief second it’s directly above them, like it’s close enough to touch, like a toy helicopter Dean played with as a kid—pinched between finger and thumb, held overhead as he raced down the back stairs and through the yard. But this one is powerful, loud, sending a wash of light over them as it goes, bright enough to blind. Dean doesn’t look away, though. Soon it’s just a dot in the dark, and then a pinprick. Small enough to be mistaken for a star, really, if there were any out to confuse it with. This night, the sky is empty.

Even as hard as Dean stares, the helicopter eventually disappears. It blips out of sight and Dean’s left looking at an empty stretch of sky, a blank space where there used to be light.

**

Present

The thing is, Dean hasn’t written a letter in a long time.

A few years ago, he’d probably been keeping the local post office in business through his mail alone. But after a while he hadn’t needed the written communication anymore—he’d found a new job, moved. Most importantly, he’d moved closer to the subject of his letters. Snail mail no more.

But here he is again. Except this time he’s standing in one of the stationary stores at the local mall, already regretting his decision, with the lady in line in front of him demanding why she can’t have personalized wedding invitations ready to be picked up by the next day. The store clerk’s eyes lift over her shoulder and find Dean’s, a kind of tortured _help me_ look that Dean’s ill-equipped to deal with. He shrugs.

Dean’s only buying one thing. A sheaf of nice stationary, without decoration, but the paper is thick and has a nice cream color. For any other occasion he wouldn’t have gone through such trouble. Normally he’d just tear out some notebook paper and stuff it into an envelope.

But, he guesses, it’s not every day that you reach out to the person who has your brother’s heart in their chest.

It hadn’t really even been his idea. In fact, he’d stubbornly been refusing to think about it all. It was Jess who showed up to his house one day with take-out in one hand and a folder in the other.

“I’ve been doing research,” she said without any preamble, kicking off her shoes and pushing the bag into his hand. “I got Chinese.”

“I’ve been craving MSG all day,” Dean had called after her back. She was already rifling through his kitchen drawers to find actual silverware, rather than the plastic fork and knife included with the meal that probably couldn’t cut a stick of warm butter. At the time, the biggest thought on his mind was that she could have called to let him know she was coming over. The counter was lined with beer bottles that he knew, by the look she cast him, that she’d seen. He put the bag of Chinese down and went to grab an armful of bottles.

“Research on what?” he asked.

“Heart transplants.”

One of the bottles slid from the crook of his arm, bounced off his foot and went rolling under the cabinets.

“Fuck!” He dumped the remaining bottles in the bulging trash can and hobbled over to the kitchen chair. He winced as he examined the top of his foot, which had a red mark already flaming across it. “I think I just lame ducked myself.”

“Dean—” Jess slid into the chair next to him.

“I know, I know. I’m better than this. Alcohol doesn’t solve your problems, it gives you new ones, et cetera. Trust me, I know.”

“Rejection of the organ is most likely to happen in the first year. Eighty-five to ninety are still living one year after their surgery, which means there’s something like a one-in-ten chance that, after all of that, you end up—”

“Don’t,” Dean said. “Just—why are you telling me this? Christ.”

“The organ recipient can’t drive for two to three months,” Jess said. “Can’t go back to work for six. They have this _mad_ amount of pills they have to take every day—up to twelve different kinds of immunosuppressants. Can’t eat a bunch of different kinds of foods, have to make sure to exercise consistently, routine doctor visits—and a whole lot more. Basically, their life is never the same again.”

“Jess,” Dean said. He was surprised to hear his voice shaking, breaking on just that one word. He thought he’d trained himself out of that by now, had enough practice. But he forgot there were always more ways to surprise him—surprise like a punch to the gut, like a slap that keeps your head ringing for days. Like when he saw a tall man with longish brown hair stuff a few dollars into a street musician’s open violin case. Like when he drove behind a car that had a Stanford U bumper sticker, or found a balled-up sock—not his own—squirreled away beneath the passenger seat of the Impala. Those kinds of things.

“Jess,” Dean said again, managing this time to keep his voice even. “Why does it matter?”

“Because there’s someone out there whose been through some major shit for the last four months, and is _still_ going through some major shit—there is someone out there walking and talking and breathing, who would be dead if they didn’t have _Sam’s heart_ in them, Dean. That’s why.”

“Yeah, well, goodie for them,” Dean said.

Jess opened and closed her mouth and then she collapsed forward across the table, taking one of his hands and pinning it between her own. Her engagement ring caught the light in a way that sent it beaming right into his eye.

“Please don’t,” she said. “Don’t say stuff like that. I’m just trying to make you understand. This is important to me.”

“Okay.”

“And I think it should be important to you, too. Maybe—maybe this sounds super cheesy and Lifetime. But if Sam’s still _here_ , somehow, if that heart transplant worked and there’s someone alive out there thanks to him—I want to believe that he’s still making a difference. Another point for the good guys. That was his thing, remember?”

“So what do you want me to do about it?” Dean said heavily. “Why _now_? It’s only been four months, it just seems way too soon—we could just wait another few months, years, whatever. What’s the fuckin’ rush?” He really wasn’t trying to be a dick. Trying would mean that he was actually putting effort into being the most disagreeable person in the tri-state area, and most days Dean wasn’t able to summon up that kind of energy.

Jess looked down at their clasped hands for a long moment. “Winchester in everything but name. That’s what you said the first time you met me.” She glanced up. “Still true. And the transplant center won’t give me any information about the heart recipient since I’m not technically family.”

“You’re his fiancée!” Dean said.

“Yeah,” Jess said. Her eyes were glassy. It was the closest Dean had seen her to crying during the last few months. “Guess that doesn’t count for anything.”

Which brought Dean to here. No matter that, if it were up to him, he’d rather pretend to think that there was a clear-case finality in the first shovelful of dirt thudding onto the casket four months ago. But that wouldn’t be strictly true. Some horrible act of science could resurrect parts of Sam, could Frankenstein his brother and send tissue here, a heart there, all while the real, actual Sam was under a gravestone outside of Berkeley.

And he wouldn’t be doing it, either, if Jess’s last name was Winchester now instead of Moore. But Sam’s accident had preceded their wedding date by six months. So that’s why Dean’s waiting in line at the stationary store, carefully not thinking about what he’s going to write in a letter that’s gonna be passed through Golden State Donor Services to the anonymous recipient living somewhere in Central to Northern California who, for all Dean knows, would probably like to pretend there was a clear-case finality in their operation, too. Nothing owed, just business. Maybe this person doesn’t want to talk about Frankenstein hearts or still-grieving brothers and fiancées or the still-present possibility of organ rejection. Maybe this person just wants to _live their life_ , and if that’s the case Dean might as well send his letter directly into the void. Because he doesn’t know what’s worse—that his letter might be ignored, or that the person might actually want to meet with him.

That day, with Jess, he’d tried to warn her. She’d smiled after he’d agreed to write the damn thing.

“I can’t see how this is gonna help anything,” he had mumbled. “You’re the nurse here. Always lecturing me about unhealthy coping habits. And then you want _this_? You don’t have a leg to stand on.”

But Jess had just laughed and pointed to his foot, propped up on the kitchen chair, and the bruise forming on it. “Technically, _you_ don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Real fuckin’ funny,” Dean had muttered. Because as much as he knew Jess was trying to make light of it, she was just as scared to reach out to that anonymous someone, too.

**

The next day, Dean has something.

It’s not much. It’s the product of four new beer bottles stuffed around the rim of the overflowing trashcan, as well as three crumpled-up pieces of stationary. But here is what he has so far:

_Hello,_

_My name is Dean. You don’t know me, but_

After a fruitless few hours of staring at that pathetic start, he’d gone to sleep. The thing is, the donor service—although not recommending this course of action, saying it best to wait a year or more before trying to contact the donation recipient— had told him a whole list of things he could and couldn’t include in this letter. Not allowed: last names, personal address, the city he lives in, his phone or email. Allowed: information about Dean himself, his hobbies and interests. How Sam’s donation affected him and others. He could even include pictures, if he wanted. Small wonder he went to bed.

And now he’s up again, his alarm clock blaring, because he has to get to work, regardless of the fact he could count the number of hours he slept on one hand.

He ends up shoving the letter into a drawer just so he doesn’t have to look at it while he’s getting ready. Not that it matters. It’s a measly eleven words. Not exactly hard to forget. But he pretends it’s not burning a hole in his desk drawer while he shaves and gargles mouthwash and finds a decently clean pair of jeans to wear.

At the garage, his few hours of sleep aren’t commented on. Garth gives him a sympathetic look, and lays a hand very briefly on his shoulder—he does that, has been doing that, every time Dean comes in looking “a bit under the weather.”

“I’m fine,” Dean mumbles.

“Yeah, yeah, of course you are,” Garth says quickly. “Bossman wants to see ya, by the way.”

“Why? I’m not late.” It comes out harsher than Dean means it to; Garth’s eyebrows shoot up.

“No clue. Sure it’s nothing but good things, though!”

Dean tries to give him a smile, but it ends up more like a grimace, and then he’s trudging off to the boss’s office. The door is already open. Inside, Bobby’s leaning back in his chair, trying to hold a piece of paper at arm’s length in order to read it. He’s farsighted and too stubborn to get glasses.

Dean raps on the doorframe. “Heard I got called to the principal’s office.”

Bobby’s eyes rake over him. “Why don’t you come and take a load off, Winchester.”

“My shift starts in a few minutes,” Dean says. But finally he kowtows and comes to sit in the squeaky rolling chair opposite Bobby’s desk.

Bobby shuffles his papers on his desk and flips his lamp on and then finally folds his hands together. “How ya been, Dean?”

“Peachy.”

Bobby’s eyes narrow down. “Great. Now why you don’t you try answering the question seriously.”

Dean pushes his foot off of Bobby’s desk and succeeds in rolling away another few feet. “I’m fine Bobby, really. Can I go back to work now?”

“There’s been some…talk,” Bobby says. “I haven’t paid it too much mind. But lately I’ve had a few calls about one of my mechanics being hostile towards customers.”

“Is this about the guy the other day? Because he’s the one who copped an attitude with me—you can’t friggin’ barter with your mechanic just ’cause you don’t like how much it costs.”

“That guy…and others,” Bobby says. He pauses to scuff his nails on his shirt and then study them. “Look. Like I said, normally I wouldn’t pay it much mind.”

“Uh huh.”

“Except I never got calls like this before,” Bobby says. “And over the past few months they’ve all been about one specific employee of mine.”

“Me,” Dean says flatly. He feels a weird, savage kind of glee in getting right to the chase, right to the subject that Bobby’s been uncomfortably dancing around. He doesn’t know why. It doesn’t explain the weird pit that just opened up in his stomach.

“You,” Bobby agrees. “And, well, it got me to thinking. You never did get around to using all your vacation days after the—the accident. Got back to working pretty fast.”

“Are you kicking me off the island?” Dean says.

“I’m just _saying_ —” Bobby begins testily.

“I’m fine,” Dean says quickly. “I’m getting more fine every day. I’m doing great.”

“Dean.”

“Don’t send me home, Bobby. Come on. Don’t make me stare at the walls every day ‘til my vacation time is gone. I’ll work on my people skills, yeah? And keep my mouth shut when I should.”

“I’m just wondering if some more time off would actually be a good thing,” Bobby says.

“Look, I’m sorry if I screwed up a few times,” Dean says. “I know, I know, bad business—”

“I’m not doing this because of the business,” Bobby says. “The business will be here when you get back. I’m doing this for you.”

Even Bobby seems surprised by his admission. He crosses his arms over his chest and looks away.

“Okay,” Dean says slowly, after a long moment. “But really. I’m doing great.  I’m dealing with it. In fact, I’m writing a letter to the person who got Sam’s heart. So I’m doing awesome.”

Bobby’s eyes widen. “A letter? What are you doing that for?”

“To get some closure,” Dean says. He avoids Bobby’s stare and instead nudges his rolling chair back and forth with one foot.

“Closure?” Bobby says. He’s still looking at Dean like he doesn’t know quite what to do with him.  “What the hell does that even mean, anyhow?”

**

Bobby lets him stay.

It should make Dean glad—glad that he could convince Bobby he was fine enough, glad that he’s not home. But it doesn’t make him feel that good, really. He goes back out to the garage and looks around at his coworkers and just feels hollow, straight through. He’s worked here for over two years—ever since he moved here to be closer to Sam. These guys are his beer buddies, his shit-shooters, his friends. And yet they’ve been watching him warily, smoothing down situations with angry customers and, when that wasn’t enough, going to Bobby with their worries.

And somehow that’s the worst part of it. They’re not mad at him for fucking up on the job—they’re worried. Dean doesn’t want his shitty actions diagnosed and explained away with sympathy and excused. He doesn’t deserve it.

Around lunch he finds a notebook in the break room and tears a page out, jagged edge and all. He hunkers down on the folding chair there and has it written out in less than five minutes.

_Hello,_

_My name is Dean. You don’t know me, but my brother Sam is the donor who gave you your heart. I would like to meet you, if you are healthy enough, and also if you even want to. Write back if you do._

Dean’s oil-stained fingerprints are smudged along the edges of the paper. It’s no nice stationary like from the store, that’s for sure. But he folds it up anyhow, and slides his fingers closed over the crease, and then begs an envelope from Bobby. And then he writes out the address for Golden State Donor Services, the one they’d given him on the phone when he called. And after that the only thing to do is stick it in his pocket until the end of the workday.

He tries not to think about it, he really does. He tries not to think about the way his pen shook when spelling out S-A-M, or how he had to force himself to write that last sentence. Closure—Bobby’s right: whatever it does mean, it isn’t a whole lot. But for Jess, at least, it means something.

Around five-thirty he’s at the post office. Dean feels a rush of relief when he slides the envelope across the counter to the mail clerk. He’d been clutching it so hard in his hand while waiting in line that the envelope had become crumpled. His hand had closed in a fist so tight that, if the letter had been a living thing, had had a pulse, he would have smothered it.

**

_July 21st, 2012_

_Sammy,_

_One last thing. I swear I’m not stalking you—if you don’t answer this one, I’ll get it. I won’t write anymore._

_I’ve been thinking about that time at the fair when you were seven. I don’t know where Dad was. We knew practically everyone that was there, anyways, so I begged Mom to let us go off by ourselves. I think there was a reason I wanted to get away from her so bad. I think that reason was a girl a grade above me._

_Mom said we could but only if we held hands. She put your hand in mine and made me squeeze it really tight. She said I couldn’t let go for even a second._

_And even though I can remember walking through the booths with you, and stopping to buy a funnel cake and to play that game where you try to shoot the bottle off the shelf—those games are fucking rigged, man—I don’t remember who let go. I just remember I lost you and couldn’t find you anywhere. And then I started crying and that girl a grade above totally saw me and thought I was lame._

_When I found Mom in the crowd I was so fucking upset, Sammy. I knew that I was going to have to tell her you were gone, and that it was all my fault. I didn’t know how she’d react. But when she saw me she smiled, and I couldn’t figure how she could be so happy, seeing me without you, when she pointed up. You were waving from the top of the friggin’ Ferris wheel. You ever been so happy to see someone you could just about kill them?_

_I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it so much. Maybe because it was one of the last times with Mom. One of the last good days, at least._

_I guess I’m wondering if you remember it, too. Or if you remember who let go of whose hand. I don’t know. My memory’s shit, anyhow._

_Dean_

**

Most of him was thinking he wouldn’t get a response at all—and if he did, at least not for months, maybe not even for a year or more. So he’s surprised when he goes to check his mail after work a few weeks later and there’s a letter tucked in there along with all of his bills, postmarked from Golden State Donor Services.

Inside, he knocks the cap of his beer off against the counter and slumps down in the kitchen chair, staring at the innocent-looking white envelope on the table. It had been light in his hand when he had sifted it from all his other mail. He wonders what that means. He takes a few long pulls from his bottle and then finally reaches forward and slits open the envelope with a finger. Inside is another envelope, the front of which merely says _Dean_ in large, neat handwriting. Dean lets himself look at that for another few minutes before he flips it over and rips up the flap.

_Hello, Dean_

_I admit I have been thinking about reaching out to you, and any of Sam’s family—it is nice to know his name, finally. I decided against contacting you so soon mostly because I realize Sam’s passing has had a profoundly different impact on our lives._

_My name is Cas. I live in Chico. Donor Services told me that, if I would like to continue contact with you, we can start communicating directly rather than through them. So I’ve included my business card, which has my home address and phone number, whichever method of communication you prefer._

_I would very much like to meet with you. I think we have much to discuss. I’m not back at work for a while yet, so please tell me when and where would best work for you._

_Cas_

Dean holds the envelope upside down and shakes out a small, rectangular card. There’s Cas’s full name— _Castiel J. Novak_ —just over the words C _PA: Broussard & Broussard LLC_. Then there’s three separate phone numbers, his work address, and his home address—121 Greydove Lane, Chico, California.

Dean flicks it back and forth between his index and middle finger, thinking. Finally he shoves it and Cas’s letter back into the envelope and stands to grab his keys from the counter. Fifteen minutes later, he’s standing outside Jess’s door, knocking. When Jess answers, she’s wearing a long Stanford U nightshirt, makeup-less. She seems surprised to see Dean on her porch.

“Hey,” she says. She looks him over and then stands back to open up the doorway. “Come on in.”

Dean maybe forgot, in the haze of driving over here, that he actually hasn’t been back since the week Sam died. In fact, he’s actively avoided it, and Jess has tacitly acknowledged it by never inviting him over for dinner, or saying that she hadn’t seen him around lately. She just shows up at his place, instead.

But now he’s here, and it’s funny how just walking over the threshold into the house, he’s hit by this scent that he couldn’t explain but just immediately _recognizes_ —in his brain, it just registers as _Sammy’s house,_ and he’s as sure of it as he’s sure that Sammy’s razor is still in the cabinet over the bathroom sink, that his smelly gym shoes are in the hallway closet, that his law books are still perfectly alphabetized on the shelves in the den. He’s only one step into their house and he already wants to pivot right around and walk out. But Jess is there, shutting the door, and she lightly puts a hand on his elbow and steers him into the kitchen.

“So,” Jess says. She pulls out one of the stools by the counter and slides into it. “What’s up?”

Dean reaches into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out the envelope. He pushes it into her hand. “You got what you wanted. The donor got back to me. He’s a he.”

Jess doesn’t say anything right away. She carefully unfolds the letter, and Dean watches her eyes move back and forth as she scans over it. A smile slips over face and then slides off again. “Cas,” she says softly, like she’s trying out the sound of it. “From Chico.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “He’s an accountant.”

“Cas the accountant, from Chico,” Jess says. She looks up. “How do you feel about meeting him?”

Dean glances distractedly around the kitchen. It’s pretty dim, with just the light over the sink on, and quiet, too. This house is so very quiet now.

“What do you mean, how do I feel about meeting him? You’re the one who wanted to meet him.”

“No, I know,” Jess says. “And I do. But you read the letter. _I would very much like to meet with you._ He’s talking about _you_ , Dean.”

“Okay, don’t pull that—I only agreed to write the damn letter, Jess. ’Cause that was the only way it would get passed through to him. I never agreed to go meet the guy.”

“Well he’s not writing here that he can’t wait to meet me,” Jess says. “And, really, there was no guarantee he was going to write back in the first place. Something about you, and your letter, it must have spoken to him—”

“Fucking unlikely,” Dean says, thinking of the short, four-sentence letter he posted to this Cas guy. There was nothing about it to be emotionally attached to, or moved by.  It was just Dean, doing the bare minimum.

“So that’s how it’s going to be? You’re just going to refuse to have any part in this?”

“Jess, I don’t think I could have made it any clearer!” Dean says. He walks away, pushing his hands through his hair, and turns back. “What are you expecting from this schmuck? An instant connection? A one-way radio tuned to Sam’s heavenly spirit? He’s just some _guy_ from _Chico_ walking around with my brother’s heart in his chest. Writing stuff about _having much to discuss_ and _profoundly different impacts_. Yeah, no shit.” Dean kicks a kitchen chair away from him; it spins across the tile and crashes into the cabinet. “Because when I was having the worst night of my life, that guy was having his life _made_. How lucky for _him_ —a brand-new heart fucking helicopter air-mailed to him before Sammy’s body is even cold.”

Jess still hasn’t said anything. When Dean looks over, he sees that her head is bowed down, hair falling forward over her face. And maybe it’s that, seeing her looking so small in Sam’s old Stanford U t-shirt, maybe it’s that, that he came here to this quiet house and made her look like that again, for raising his voice at her and kicking chairs across the kitchen.

“Okay,” Dean says. He carefully picks up the fallen chair and puts it back in its place. He sits down in it. “Look. I’ll write him back. I’ll see him, okay?”

Jess tucks her hair behind her ear. “No,” she says. “You don’t have to do that, Dean.”

“No, I’ll do it,” Dean says. “I want to do it.”

“No you don’t,” Jess says.

“No…I don’t,” Dean finally agrees. That makes Jess finally look up and meet his eye. “But I know you do. And that’s enough for me, okay? If you want to see him, we’ll see him.”

Jess gives him a thin smile. “Thanks, Dean.”

You don’t have to—” Dean says. He blinks hard and looks down at the table. “Not for doing the bare minimum. Which is all I can seem to do, lately.”

Jess gets up and pads over to him, resting her arm around his shoulder. “I know you’re trying.”

Dean can’t seem to find any words to answer her with. But eventually he digs into his pocket and takes out his phone, and Jess drops into the seat next to him and lays the business card out so he can see it. They’re both silent while he types the numbers into his phone.

“Okay,” Dean says. “How about this: Hi Cas, it’s Dean. Does this weekend work for you? Sam’s fiancée Jess and I could meet you in Sacramento—good halfway point. Meet up at a coffee shop? Let me know.”

“How about, at the end, you say, we’d be delighted to see you.”

“Delighted, huh?” In the cast of the overhead light, there are faint bags underneath Jess’s eyes. She has her knees pulled up to her chest, and her arms tucked up into Sam’s shirt, so that the sleeves hang empty on either side of her. This is another one of the reasons why Dean hasn’t let himself come here, but here he is, anyways.

“Yeah,” Jess says. “Delighted.” So Dean adds that sentence to the end of the text and hits send.

**

Dean wakes up the next morning to two texts.

The first is from Castiel Novak.

_How does Saturday work? Last time I was in Sacramento, I quite liked Temple Coffee. I look forward to meeting the both of you—C_

He can’t help but snort.  Based on what he saw from the letter yesterday and now this text today, everything this Cas guy has said so far has been meaningless polities, distanced niceties, with hardly anything personal to help him get a read on the guy. Just that he’s Cas, an accountant from Chico, and he somehow manages to approach meeting the family of the man who donated his heart with the same nonchalance that someone else would plan for a Sunday picnic.

Jess had texted him, too.

_Couldn’t find a Cas/Castiel Novak anywhere on Facebook. WHO doesn’t have a Facebook these days??_

Honestly, the thought of trying to find any information about the guy on the Internet hadn’t even crossed his mind. With all of the other nasty feelings Dean’s had about this proposed meet-up, the way the guy looks hadn’t been something that had occurred to Dean at all.

**

There is one tiny hitch in the plan. Dean isn’t aware of it until late Saturday morning, when he pulls up outside Jess’s house and waits. And waits. Finally, grumbling to himself, he throws the car into park and jumps up the porch stairs.

“Jess?” he calls, but he doesn’t get any answer. The door is unlocked, though, so he walks in and calls her name again. From there, he only has to follow the sounds of someone retching into the toilet.

“Oh, Jess,” he says, coming to a stop at the bathroom door. Jess is leaned over the sink, swallowing water from the tap while the toilet flushes.

She pulls away and wipes her mouth. “I think there’s a problem,” she says, too brightly.

“You think?” He hadn’t meant for his voice to come out so harsh; she wilts a little bit.

“Sorry,” she says. “I think it’s food poisoning—Jacqueline brought a bunch of leftovers from her son’s birthday party for all the nurses last night, and Tony’s already called me to ask if I’m feeling sick, too. I haven’t had a chance to text Andr—” Dean shifts in the doorway. “You know what, you really don’t need to know all of that.”

Dean sighs. “This is just awfully convenient.” Jess starts to open her mouth and he shakes his head. “Not you. I feel like this is more of a cosmic punishment.”

“Are you—are you going to still go? I think you should go.”

“Don’t really have a choice, do I?” Dean says. “It would be pretty dickish to blow him off only hours before we were supposed to meet him.”

“I know this isn’t…optimal,” Jess says. “But I think you’re doing the right thing. As much as I know you’re still unsure about this situation, think about how _he_ must feel. I bet he’s really nervous.”

“Hmm,” Dean says. He looks around the bathroom rather than answering. There are still two toothbrushes in the holder by the sink. He doesn’t want Jess to catch him staring so he twitches his eyes away just in time to see her run to the toilet bowl and start dry heaving over it. He walks over and puts his hand on her shoulder. After a few minutes she pulls away and flushes the toilet again.

“I’ll be fine,” Jess says. “Today’s gonna be pretty rough but I can handle it.”

“You kicking me out?”

“Yep,” Jess says. She wobbles up and reaches for her toothbrush. “I’m gonna brush the vomit flavor out of my mouth, like a champ, then I’m going to go lie down for a little bit until I have to hurl again.”

“All right,” Dean says. He claps her on the shoulder. “Well. I’ll go and uphold the family name, and all that.”

Jess puts her hand over his, keeping it pinned on her shoulder. “You’re going to be nice to him, right?”

Dean scoffs. “Of course I will.”

“Okay,” she says. “I just—I wouldn’t want to scare him off. I want to meet him, too.”

“I’m sure it’ll go great,” Dean says, and tries not to feeling like the biggest liar in the world when he says it, either.

After a quick hug goodbye, Dean tromps back out of the house and into the car. He doesn’t leave right away. He puts the car in gear and just looks at the door of the house for a minute or two. He wishes Jess was coming with him. He wishes—well.

**

It’s almost two hours to Sacramento. The weather’s nice, like it almost always is here, and Dean drives with an elbow cocked out of the window, a familiar tape deck shuffling through the songs he knows by heart.

It’s funny, how much this drive reminds him of one he took just a few years ago. It had seemed like a big move at the time—Dean, leaving behind his childhood home in Kansas to move close to Sam. His brother had finally replied to the letters Dean had been sending him; a mishap where the only address Dean had had for Sam was for a house he moved out of after his first year in college. That’s how long Dean and Sam had gone without talking to each other: three years. And then, slowly sorting out the fragile feelings between them, feeling their way into being brothers again. And Dean, sick of letters and phone calls, feeling like he had nothing left for him in Kansas, thought that by moving to California, he’d have all the time in the world to make things right with Sam.

In the end, he’d only had two years.

Dean puts that trip out of mind and tries to focus on the road in front of him, the reassuring curve of the steering wheel under his hands. These two drives aren’t that similar, really. Once he was eager, nervous, anticipating a destination where his brother, like an old friend, would be waiting to pull him into a hug. Nothing like this—an awkward coffee date with a stranger.

Sacramento’s skyline slides into view and he sighs. He’s almost there. Closer to closure—whatever that means.

**

He’s about fifteen minutes early to this meet-up at Temple Coffee Roasters. He’s starting to feel a little jittery, anxious, but after a minute or two of pacing the barista is giving him a strange look so he finally slumps down into one of the tables along the wall, jiggling his knee beneath it while he waits.

If Jess were here, he’d probably feel better. Probably. She’d no doubt be talking Dean’s ear off—how delighted she is, how much she wants to put Castiel Novak at ease as soon as he gets here, how much she wants to hit it off with him. But Jess isn’t here, and now Dean’s thinking that this is the worst fucking idea of his life, and then he’s thinking that—if Jess _isn’t_ here—why can’t he just say Castiel Novak never showed up? In fact, if he got up right now, it wouldn’t even be that much of a lie.

_Yeah, Jess, I went to the coffee shop all right. Waited around, but I never saw him. It’s too bad, huh?_

Jess wouldn’t question it. In her mind, there’d be no one at fault. Castiel Novak’s absence would be explained away as nerves, fear, maybe even health problems. She’d suggest giving him a few more months to recuperate. Or maybe she’d just never try at all, and this one failed attempt could put the kibosh on any Lifetime feel-good moments concerning Dean Winchester.

The bell over the door chimes as someone walks through. Dean glances up, sees a young woman in an exercising outfit, and then looks away again, his knee still bobbing away beneath the table. That’s probably why he doesn’t see the woman hold the door open for the man coming in behind her, at least not until he senses someone walking by him very slowly, like the person is uncertain of where to go.

This guy is wearing a long tan trench coat, even though it’s easily seventy degrees outside, and slacks. He’s already walked past Dean, so Dean doesn’t catch his face, just sees the dark head of hair, tousled and a little too long, high on his forehead. The guy stops in the middle of the store and slowly looks around. Dean follows his gaze and sees that the guy is staring a little too long at an elderly couple sitting in the corner.

Dean wonders if maybe this isn’t his guy, then, but then he remembers—he told Cas to expect Jess, too. He half-rises from his chair.

“Hey, uh,” he says, raising his voice a little. “You Cas?”

The guy slowly turns to face him. He looks…he looks—Dean’s brain summons and then discards a few different options—he looks different than what Dean was expecting. Young—he couldn’t be more than a few years older than Dean himself. Early to mid-thirties, Dean would guess. A round, full face with blue eyes, currently narrowed down to a squint of confusion, and the suggestion of stubble on swollen-looking cheeks. Overall, he looks normal. Perfectly normal.

“Yes, I’m—Dean?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, still half-crouched over the table. “I’m flying solo. Sorry for the confusion.”

Cas comes over the stands next to the chair opposite Dean. He sticks his hand out for Dean to take. Dean does, staring kind of dumbly at the broad-palmed, long-fingered hand grasping his. “I’m Cas,” he says. His voice is surprisingly deep, hoarse.  “Obviously. Sorry. You know that.”

“No problem,” Dean says slowly. After another moment Cas awkwardly drops into the empty chair.

Cas, the accountant, from Chico. A living, breathing, real person. Someone who’d been on death’s door months ago, apparently, living now thanks only to the borrowed heart that beats in his chest. Cas is looking at Dean a little oddly, like he’s surprised by what he sees, too. So for a second they just sit there taking each other in.

He’s a bit goofy looking, Dean decides. Sitting there, shoulders slumped, in a trench coat and slacks and sensible shoes. Even if Dean didn’t know he was an accountant, he could have guessed just from the get-up. Like the guy was dressing to impress, but only had his CPA suits to fall back on. Then again, he isn’t wearing a tie—maybe an attempt to seem more casual, less business luncheon. He wonders how long Cas had spent in front of the mirror this morning, trying and discarding different combinations of button-ups and slacks, carefully rearranging his hair to look cool and effortless. The thought almost makes him smile.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Cas says.

“I’m the one who asked you to meet,” Dean points out.

“Oh,” Cas says. “Of course.” Then there’s nothing but silence.

Dean wonders if Cas has watched all those awful videos on YouTube, the ones where the donor family sets up a meeting with the heart recipient. Dean’s seen enough to get the gist. The families crowding joyfully around the heart recipient, like some big damn reunion. They’re laughing and crying at the same time, pulling this stranger into familiar hugs, laying their hands upon them, like this person is a gift, a miracle. Like this person is the next best thing to what’s really missing. Apparently that kind of stuff is really supposed to knot up your heartstrings.

But Dean can’t—won’t—react like that. Is this guy expecting a hug? He certainly hopes not.

Dean abruptly stands up. “Coffee?” he says.

“Oh,” Cas says again. “Thank you, but no.” Dean must be looking at him funny, because Cas even tries to explain. “I can’t,” he says, and gestures vaguely to the area of his chest. “I’m on a specialized diet. Coffee isn’t allowed.”

“You’re the one who suggested this joint,” Dean says, a little incredulous. It’s not like Sacramento is hard up on a million other places they could have met.

“Right, I—I guess I was trying to stick with the plan. You suggested we meet at a coffee shop,” Cas says.

“Okay,” Dean says. ‘Well. I’m gonna go get myself a coffee, then.”

“Okay,” Cas says. He looks uncomfortable. Well, join the club. Dean walks up to the counter and tries to focus on what’s on the board ahead of him. So people with heart transplants can’t have coffee. Good to know. Maybe something he should have known before. He orders and then lingers nearby, watching the barista deftly making his coffee, trying to cast a subtle glance towards his table to see if Cas is still there. Which he is—sitting with his hands folded like he could wait on Dean all damn day. Which he can. Because he has nothing but time, now.

Dean’s coffee is slid over to him, and he distracts himself by taking a scalding sip that nearly burns his tongue off. Then he walks back to the table and sits heavily in the chair opposite Cas.

“So,” Dean says. He waves his coffee-holding hand to indicate Cas’s upper half. “Everything…in working order?”

Cas gives him a small smile. “Rejection is most likely to happen in the first few months, and I had no complications. So I’ve been doing very well, Dean, thank you.” He takes a deep breath. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about your brother, Dean. As long as you’re comfortable with it—”

“I was actually hoping I could spend a little time getting to know you,” Dean says. He pops the lid off his coffee and swallows back a big gulp of it. “Virtual stranger, and all that.”

“Me?” Cas repeats. He looks faintly alarmed. “I was thinking we would be talking about Sam.”

“All roads lead back to him,” Dean says. He notices Cas’s hands are finely trembling on the table. “You nervous or something?”

Cas follows Dean’s gaze down to his fingers and then moves one hand to cover the other, like the pressure will chase out the slight tremors. “It’s nothing,” he says. “One of many side effects of my medications.” He looks up into Dean’s face, his blue eyes serious, seemingly without guile. “What do you want to know about me?”

Dean shrugs. Technically, he really doesn’t want to know anything. He was perfectly happy sticking with a “the less you know” philosophy until Jess strong-armed him into this. But he doesn’t want to talk about Sam, like he was some rare artifact, some exotic zoo animal, just so this stranger can feel like he knows him now. And he’s _not_ going to talk about himself.

But when Dean shrugs, the strangest expression seems to cross Cas’s face. A look like he had a hypothesis that just got confirmed. Like whatever’s happening here, he’s resigned to it. Cas sits up a little straighter and pulls his shoulders back.

“I have been in and out of hospitals almost my whole life. For years I struggled with a faulty heart valve that can probably be traced back to a childhood illness that was not treated as soon as it should have been. I had surgery to replace it a few years ago, but…it didn’t take.” Cas lifts one hand to rub his chest, seemingly unconsciously. “My cardiologist suggested putting me on the wait list for a heart transplant. At the time, it didn’t seem necessary. But then things got harder. I had to go on leave from work. It reached a point where I couldn’t even climb stairs.” He looks up at Dean. “I have no doubt in my mind that that transplant saved my life.”

“Right,” Dean says. “So what are you gonna do with your new lease on life?”

“I—” Cas falters. The hand on his chest falls back to the table. “I can go back to work in a matter of weeks. I’m an accountant.”

“Yeah, I know,” Dean says. “You sent me your business card.”

“Right,” Cas says. “And—just trying to live the healthiest life I can. Eating right. My doctors have given me some basic exercise routines to stay in shape.”

Dean’s gaze skips down at his coffee, his fingers folded around it. “Right,” he echoes.

Cas seems to be in a similar predicament. He’s sitting there staring a hole in the table like he’s trying to work out the solution to a very difficult math problem.

“When I was a kid, before my illness, I remember I liked to run,” he says finally.

“Like—” Dean mimes his two fingers jogging across the tabletop.

“Yes,” Cas says. He smiles hesitantly, in relief. “Maybe I can work my way up to training for a marathon.”

Dean even starts smiling back. There’s something just so goofy and innocent about Cas’s face when he says it. And then Cas shifts a little in his seat, and for a moment the collar of his button-up gapes open and Dean can see it. The scar. Just the tip of it, a light red color, nestled in the notch of his collarbone. And seeing it is like having cold water thrown right in his face.

“Sam used to run marathons,” Dean says abruptly.

Cas’s face turns serious, unsure of this new territory. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yep. All around. Sometimes he’d even travel to other states for ‘em.”

Cas nods. “I’m sure he was very good at it,” he says.

And that great nasty pit opens up in Dean’s stomach like it never left.

“Are you?” he says. “Are you _sure_? ’Cause you and Sam were such buds, right? You just knew him so well?”

Cas’s shoulders hunch in his coat. “I didn’t mean to—” he says softly.

Dean pushes his coffee cup to the side of the table. “You want to know about _Sam_?  Okay. I’ll tell you all about him. On the last night of his life, a semi ran a red light and plowed Sammy’s car through a guard rail. Poor son of a bitch should have just died right then. Brain bleed. But they took him to the hospital and stuck a bunch of tubes in him and let us say goodbye to whatever was left. He was still breathing when I left, you know that? It was like he was just _sleeping_.”

Cas looks stricken. “That sounds horrible.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. He’s breathing fast. “Yeah. Jesus.” He moves to get up and Cas puts his hand over Dean’s.

“Dean,” he says. “Please. I know—”

Cas flinches when Dean rips his hand away. “No, you _don’t_ know, that’s the whole _point_.” The chair screeches and rocks on its legs when Dean stands up. He knows the other patrons in the coffee shop are staring, but he doesn’t look away from Cas. “Don’t say that you _know_. Don’t say that you’re _sure_ he was good at something. Like that somehow makes it better, right? Don’t try to say nice things about him like you’re doing me a favor.”

“I’m sorry,” Cas says, head bowed, barely audible.

“Sammy was my brother. He was my best fucking friend in the world. And he had a _purpose_ in life, he was going to do things. Great things—” Dean has to stop and press his fist to his mouth for a moment. “His purpose wasn’t for you, okay? He wasn’t just—just some _guy_.”

“He wasn’t just some donor,” Cas says to the table.

“I gotta go,” Dean says. “I just, I can’t—” He doesn’t finish his sentence. The door is already closing behind him.

**

_August 3rd, 2012_

_I’m not talking to Dad anymore, either, if you were wondering._

_I wanted to tell you this differently—on the phone, or in person, I don’t know. But you might as well know. Dad’s gone. I don’t know where he went._

_For a while I’ve been waiting for him to come back. But I think he’s okay. I think he’s being out of touch on purpose, honestly._

_And, okay, clean slate. Maybe I did finally write to you because he was gone. And I’ve just been stuck here. Because where am I supposed to go now? I can’t just leave the house empty and fuck off somewhere. All of Mom’s stuff is here, and all our kid stuff, too. So in the meantime I’ve been working—got myself a job at Don’s, that mechanic on 7th, remember?—and trying to figure out what to do next._

_I really owe you an apology, Sammy. I can still remember how angry you were at me. Angry and hurt. I know you’d expect that pushback from Dad but not from me. It was always the two of us against the world, remember? But color me surprised that I ever agreed with Dad about something in the first place. And maybe the reasoning was different—you said so yourself, Dad didn’t want you to go to Stanford because he’d rather keep you under his thumb. But I was a dick about it, too, because I didn’t want you to leave me behind with him._

_The thing is, I never thought it would go this far. Us not talking for so long. I didn’t think Dad was serious about the whole ‘never show your face around here’ thing, either. Just shows how stubborn we all are. But I really got a taste of my own medicine when I tried to pull the same stunt. Dad caught wind that I wanted to leave town and he laid into me like you wouldn’t believe._

_I do think it’s a control thing. I think you’re right. Because when he saw I was serious about leaving, he just up and disappeared, because he knew there was no better way to keep me here. So now you know why I’ve been acting like a pen pal hopped up on acid these past few weeks. It is partly because I have nothing else to do._

_Write me back already, would you?_

_Dean_

**

At first Jess is laid up with the food poisoning so it’s easy to avoid her.

Then, after a few days, not so easy. He’s lucky that she works two evening shifts in a row once she’s feeling better, but his luck runs out eventually. She uses her spare key and walks right into his house to where he’s wallowing on the couch.

“Mind explaining why I’ve gotten the freeze the past few days?” She sits down on the sofa before he can move his feet aside. He awkwardly tries to unwedge his stuck foot from beneath her.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Bullshit,” Jess says. “Dean, what the hell. You went completely AWOL after meeting Cas. You _know_ how much I wanted to meet him. I have a million questions, and you’ve purposely been avoiding me.”

“Yeah…” Dean says. He can’t seem to find it in him to look her in the face.

“ _Dean_.” She leans forward and catches his eye. “Are you okay? Just let me know what’s going on.”

Dean feels tears prickling at the edges of his eyelids. Now he’s done it. He’s been laid up for hours watching mindless medical drama after mindless medical drama, he knows he must reek of alcohol, and now he’s about to bawl all over the both of them. Fuckin’ pathetic.

“I,” he says. He puts his palms over his eyes. “Jess, I might have done a really bad thing.”

There’s a long silence before Jess draws his hands away. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t think you’re gonna have a chance to meet him,” Dean whispers. “I don’t think he’s gonna want anything to do with us ever again.”

He’s not even aware that he’s crying until he feels Jess pulling him up into a sitting position, and there they are, a tangle of limbs on the couch, his head finding its way into her shoulder. The material of her shirt is sticking wetly to his eyes.

“It’s okay,” says Jess, who already has so much to deal with, who deserves so much better than this. He just wants to let her know how sorry he is.

“He was just a guy,” Dean says thickly, wonderingly, his voice catching in his throat. “He was just some— _guy_.”

**

 

 

 


	2. Part II

Part II

It’s a day like most other days.

Dean’s leaving work. It’s just after five on a Friday, and Garth is yelling something out at him from the bay, but Dean can’t hear him, so he just waves his hand and folds himself into the Impala.

Like most other days, he’s been doing okay at work. He’s not going to win any Employee of the Month awards, that’s for sure. But Bobby hasn’t had to threaten him with vacations days since they had that sit-down chat two months before, which must count for something. Garth doesn’t put a hand on his shoulder nearly as much. And Andy, who’d seemed a little uncomfortable around Dean following the accident, had even invited him to poker night in his van later that week. Dean probably wouldn’t go. But he’s appreciating the return to something like normalcy, if only at his job.

He gets a text from Jess on the way home. All it says is, _I’m coming over_. They actually hadn’t made plans to see each other. In fact, Dean had thought that Jess’s family was still in town—they’d been staying at her place for the past few days. They’d been there a lot just after the funeral, too. They liked to come around for Jess’s _sensitive times_.

Jess is already in his driveway when he gets home. Her driver’s side door is swung open and she’s got her feet halfway out. She doesn’t come out so Dean, after parking, walks over and leans against her door.

“Thought your family was in town.”

“They are,” she says. “That’s why I have to do this here.”

“Do what?”

Jess doesn’t answer right away. She looks tired. Not that that’s anything new—and Dean’s not one to think uncharitable thoughts towards Jess. That’s just how she’s looked ever since Sam’s accident, and Dean knows better than to say anything. It’s only been six months. And what’s she supposed to say—that she’s fine? That she’s working through it? She doesn’t need to be reassured that she’s been dealing with it so well, how remarkably hardy she is in the face of such tragedy. She shouldn’t have to explain it in the first place.

But there’s more to it than that. Dean’s been feeling guilty, lately, about how he’s been contributing to the bags under Jess’s eyes. Jess never brings up that meeting Dean had with Castiel Novak, but he has to think that she thinks about it, too. What a missed opportunity it was. What would have happened if she hadn’t been sick that day. It’s possible that her presence would have kept a lid on Dean’s anger. But she wasn’t there, and Dean reamed the guy out before stomping out of the coffee shop, and Dean can’t say that he’s very surprised he’s never heard from Cas again. Sometimes, a few beers in, he’ll get out his phone and play with the idea of texting him something. A short and to-the-point apology. Mostly he wants to do it just so it could clear the air and give Jess a chance to meet him—she had been so excited, delighted, by the idea of meeting him— but he has to admit he feels a little guilty about Cas, too. Thinking about how Cas just sat there and took it. The tremble in his fingers.  Anyways, he never does text the guy, and Jess never does say anything, and Dean’s left with some strange, orphaned throb of dissatisfaction.

So Dean’s already more predisposed to do anything Jess requires. Mostly because it’s _Jess_ , and also because she’s been the one constant in Dean’s life since Sam died, and also a little bit because of the Cas situation that’s never going to get resolved. So Dean doesn’t even blink when Jess lifts a garment bag out of her passenger seat and passes it to him, even though he’s not entirely sure what’s going on yet.

“They tried to talk me out of it,” Jess says. “They said I could use it as a keepsake, even though my whole house is basically that already.”

“Oh,” Dean says. He gets it now. He looks from the garment bag to Jess and then takes her elbow. “You know what we need to do first?”

“Get royally hammered,” Jess says. He’s glad they’re on the same page.

Today’s a day like most other days, except it happens to be the day that Sam and Jess’s wedding would have been.

It would have been perfect, Dean thinks, looking up at the sky as he walks into the house with Jess. It’s that perfect shade of California blue today, and what clouds there are look like confections, spun sugar. They had planned for an outdoor ceremony; Sam’s friend Charlie was going to preside over it. A big white tent in the field for afterwards, the reception, Dean giving his best man’s speech in the falling golden light.

Dean clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “That sounds like a great idea.”

**

Dean busts out the good stuff in honor of the occasion.  They end up sitting shoulder to shoulder on the railing of the deck, not saying much, just enjoying the hot whiskey slide down their throats. Jess tilts her face up to the sun and sighs.

“Okay,” Jess says. “I don’t have any feeling left in my fingers. Now’s the time, huh?”

“Yeah, okay,” Dean says. He drains his glass and then sets it aside. He pounds down the stairs in front of her and to the fire pit—he can’t remember the last time he used this thing. But there’s still a stack of logs next to it, which he carefully arranges in the belly of the pit, and then he runs back into the house for some newspapers to ball up around it. All the while, Jess watches from one of the chairs nearby, the garment bag pooled across her lap.

Dean steps back and gestures to it. “I think it’s ready.”

Jess nods and unzips the garment bag carefully. It falls away. Then she clumsily balls up the wedding dress in her arms and comes over next to Dean. She shoves it in, and Dean rearranges some of the logs and newspaper around it, and then they stumble back up and Dean grabs for the lighter fluid. He really douses it. And then he gives Jess the honor of the matchbook.

“Jesus,” she says. “That thing cost fifteen hundred dollars, did you know that? And people think I should just keep it, uselessly hanging on a rack for the rest of my life. In _memoriam_. ” She strikes the match, and it catches, and she drops it into the fire pit.

A great roar of flame blazes up with it, and Dean feels the scorch in his cheeks. For a while he just stares, not really thinking anything.

“It was strapless,” Jess says. “I think they call it a sweetheart neckline. It went like _this_ —” And she uses the side of her hand to sketch the shape of it beneath her collarbone. “And it was all over with lace. I remember Mom saying it was a little bit plain. But it fit me like a glove, right? It was like the dress was made for me. And my favorite part was how it flared out at the bottom, like a bell, or something. It was so pretty, Dean. It had these little diamonds stitched into the skirt. Like raindrops, or something—they glittered when the light hit them just right.” She draws in a shaking breath. “It’s good luck to have rain on your wedding day, Dean.”

She doesn’t say anything else. After a little while Dean puts his hand on the back of her neck and keeps it there.

“Jessica Moore,” he says. “You would have made such a fucking _beautiful_ bride.”

Jess leans heavily into his side. Her hair smells like lighter fluid, like smoke.

**

Dean would think he might have hit a limit on the number of bad ideas he’s had over the past few months, but today is Sam’s birthday, so apparently not.

To backtrack, he made the incredibly stupid decision to go hang out in Andy’s van with, obviously, Andy, as well as Tracy, the new mechanic Bobby had hired last week. She knew her way around an engine, too, not that Dean was stupid enough to remark upon that like it would somehow flatter her. Garth wasn’t so lucky.

“I was just trying to give her a compliment,” Garth had whispered to Dean when Dean found him still looking a little shell-shocked in the break room. “I really _haven’t_ ever seen a girl change out a battery so fast.”

“Yeah, hence the reason she got hired in the first place, numbnuts,” Dean had said. No one really knew what Tracy had said to Garth in return, either, just that he’d grown very pale and now seemed afraid to even look at her. That’s probably why Garth hadn’t come with them, actually. So there Dean is, listening to some groovy mood music with Andy and Tracy and wondering if he just wandered into something he shouldn’t have.

“Drinks in honor of the new girl!” Andy proclaims. “Don’t worry, Trace, we’ll go easy on you.”

“You’ll go easy on _me_ , huh?” Tracy says. Andy’s uncapping a bottle of vodka to pour them all shots, but Tracy put her hand over his to stop him. This is probably the time that Dean should have been thinking about hitting the road, too. Not because he’s about to walk into some kinky threesome in the back of Andy’s van, or anything. But because then Tracy knee-walks over to Andy’s collection of liquor bottles and grabs two more.

“Bottoms up,” she says, giving Andy and Dean a bottle each. Then she unscrews the vodka bottle and knocks back a good glug.

“Take me to church,” Andy whispers faintly.

Dean can’t remember much more about that night. He remembers that Tracy had given him a bottle of Fireball, which fuckin’ burned on the way down. His mouth felt hot and spiced, his body felt weightless, he felt fuckin’ _good_. He remembers Andy taking a drag from some kind of pipe and offering it to Dean, who went to take a puff only for Tracy to snatch it out of his hand and pass it back to Andy. He remembers this happened a couple of times, Andy offering, Tracy wordlessly pushing it away before Dean could take it.

“You’re a good woman, Tracy,” he remembers slurring. He remembers clambering out of the back of the van so he could take a piss in the alley nearby—nearly falling flat on his face as he did so, too. He remembers the screen of his phone, blurry and out of focus, held up close to his face as he scrolled through his contacts. He wanted to call someone.

And then he wakes up, crunched up in the back of Andy’s van, pantsless, with his mouth tasting like he spent the night licking lead pipes or something. Tracy’s on the other side of the van from him, sleeping with her arm over her eyes. Andy’s in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel.

Dean sighs and stares up at the ceiling for a while. Jess is probably going to have another talk about unhealthy coping habits with him; he can’t blame her. It had felt better at the time to drink past remembering anything Sam-related. Dean feels around for his jeans and finds them folded up neatly by his feet. Thank God for small favors. He’s trying to wriggle into them silently but Tracy suddenly snuffles awake and moves her arm away to blink at him.

“You feeling okay, champ?”

Dean laughs. “Like complete shit. What about you?”

Tracy sits up on an elbow. “Physically, I might puke in the next few minutes. But morally, I won a victory last night.” She nudges her empty vodka bottle with a toe.

“Yeah, you fuckin’ drank us under the table,” Dean says. He stands up as much as he can in the back of the van so he can zip up his fly. “Why were my jeans off, anyhow?”

Tracy shrugs. “You said you need room to breathe when you drink.” She smiles. “Or you gave Andy a lap dance.”

“Shut the fuck up. You’re kidding.” Tracy lies down and puts her arm back over her eyes. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nighty night, Dean.”

Dean stumbles out of the back of the van and looks around. It’s early morning; almost no one is out. The sun is hurting his eyes a little bit. He’s jangling his keys out of his pocket as he walks back to the Impala, parked down the street, and gets out his phone to check for any messages. Except when he unlocks his phone, the screen opens straight to his call log. Most of them look familiar—outgoing and incoming calls from the past few days. Jess, Jess, Bobby, the dentist last month—he really doesn’t call people that often, anyhow.

But there’s a new name at the very top of his call screen. An outgoing call to Castiel Novak at 2:32 last night. And when Dean sees that, he gets this incredibly queasy feeling in his stomach, and for a second there he’s not sure if he’s going to projectile vomit all over himself or what.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “Son of a bitch.”

The call had lasted for one minute and fifty-three seconds. Dean’s thumb hovers over the screen as he stares. He has to wonder just how many fucked-up things he managed to hurl at Castiel Novak before that minute fifty-three was through.

**

Dean spends most of his day feeling like a general asshole. He does things he never does—empty his bedroom trash, for one thing, rather than trying to aggressively push it down whenever it gets too high. He can’t find anything on TV to watch so he spends a mindless half hour watching a documentary about monarch butterflies. He finds all the spare change he can and carefully separates them into rolls of pennies, nickels, quarters. Finally he has to admit that he’s just stalling.

He wasn’t anticipating getting that drunk last night—not that it’s any excuse. He’s nearly thirty years old. He probably shouldn’t be slinging back Fireball in a van that smells like patchouli in the first place. All he knows is that Drunk-Dean thought it was a great idea to dial Castiel Novak up in the middle of the night and slur God-knows-what all over the mouthpiece of his phone. Dean had pretty much made a pact with himself that he’d never talk to the guy again. But he’d broken it last night and now, thanks to that, he’s about to break it again.

Finally he slumps down onto one of the kitchen chairs and hits _redial_. The phone rings a few times.

“Hello?” That familiar low, rough voice.

“Hey, uh, hey. This is Dean, Dean Winchester?” He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. This is already going bad, and he hadn’t had high expectations to begin with. “Look, man. I promise I’ll make it short and sweet. I just wanted to apologize—”

“Again?” That causes Dean’s eyes to pop open.

“Again?” Dean says. “Uh…”

Now Cas sounds confused. “You called and left me a voicemail last night,” he says. “I didn’t have a chance to listen to it until today. You said you were sorry for the way things ended when we last saw each other.”

“Right,” Dean says. A voicemail. A voicemail _apologizing_. Still not something Sober-Dean would be inclined to do, but it’s so much better than the awful alternatives he’s been entertaining all day. “Yeah, of course. I guess—well, if you couldn’t tell, I was pretty toasted when I left that voicemail. It was Sam’s birthday and— to be honest, I don’t even remember calling you.”

“Oh,” Cas says. He sounds a little disappointed.

“Which isn’t to say I didn’t mean it,” Dean says hurriedly. “There’s just….better ways I could have gone about it. Or, you know, just not screaming you out in the first place would have worked, too.”

The other end of the line is silent. “Yes, well,” Cas says. He seems to be choosing his words very deliberately. “Thank you for calling me, Dean. It means a lot.”

Dean could end it there. Done and dusted. A happy last chapter with everything tied neatly together, him and Cas parting cordially. But something keeps him from saying goodbye.

“It’s, uh, weird talking to you again. Good weird, I mean. I wasn’t if sure we would do that again.”

“I wasn’t sure, either,” Cas says. It’s all very diplomatic. But there has to be a reason that Cas isn’t making a move to end the conversation either, right?

“And I guess I should say that…four months after the fact was still four months too soon. I mean, who would have thought—donor services was right; I should have waited. I really wasn’t ready to deal with anything yet, and—this shit is always gonna be weird to me. It’s just a really fucking weird situation. But maybe…I mean, only if you want to—”

“Yes,” Cas says immediately.

“Yes, what?” Dean says, since he isn’t sure himself where he was going with that.

“If you wanted to meet. I would like that.”

“You—you would?” Dean can’t keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“Yes,” Cas says again. It’s awfully silent on that end of the phone; Dean wonders where he is. “We could…try again.”

“I could bring Jess,” Dean says. “Sam’s fiancée—you didn’t get to meet her last time. She was really bummed about that, too.”

“Okay,” Cas says. The guy’s so even-keel—Dean remembers that, from their meeting at Temple Coffee. That he was nervous, but, besides some tells, pretty good at hiding it. So it makes it hard for Dean to figure out whether this guy actually has a vested interest in meeting up again after that trainwreck first encounter, or if the guy has some kink about punishing himself. Because _Dean_ wouldn’t be taking the olive branch, if he were in Cas’s shoes. Dean probably wouldn’t even have answered the phone.

“Okay,” Dean says, in this faux-hearty voice that doesn’t even sound like it’s his. He winces. “Maybe we could meet up in Sacramento again?”

“Yes, all right,” Cas says.

“Not that coffee shop again, though,” Dean says. “Actually, how about no coffee shops period. Maybe we could try to find a place that works for you this time.”

“That would be nice,” Cas says. He sounds cautiously pleased, maybe surprised that Dean remembered. “I’ll do some research and let you know.”

“Jess is gonna be so happy,” Dean says fervently. “Just—thanks, man.”

“I’m back at work now,” Cas says, sidestepping the gratitude. “So weekends work best for me. How does Saturday work for you?”

“Saturday’s awesome,” Dean says. “See you then.”

“Okay,” Cas says. Dean can tell by his voice that Cas is happy. He imagines Cas on the other end of the line with a soft, small smile. “I’m going to hang up now. Take care, Dean.”

Dean pulls the phone away from his ear and stares at it. _Call disconnected_ is still flashing on his screen. Out of all the ways he thought that phone call might end, this wasn’t one of them.

**

He calls Jess later that day.

“Hello?” There’s a rumble of noise in the background, like a truck’s passing by, and the sound of multiple voices.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“I’m at lunch with Charlie,” Jess says. And then, slightly muffled, “It’s Dean.”

“Wassup, bitch!” a voice crows in the background.

“Tell Charlie I said hi,” Dean says. “Listen, I just had to tell you something really fast. I know you’re busy right now. Make sure you’re free on Saturday, okay?”

“Sure,” Jess says. She sounds a little distracted. “What’s going on?”

“We’re gonna go meet up with Cas,” Dean says, cool as a cucumber.

“ _What_?”

“Okay, enjoy your lunch with Charlie!”

“How?—”

“I’ll tell you all about it later, promise. Talk to you soon!”

“Dea—” she’s saying, breathlessly, half-laughing, when he hangs up the phone.

She’s at his house less than fifteen minutes later.

**

So that’s how Dean finds himself idling on the curb outside of Jess’s house on Saturday, waiting for her to get her ass outside and into the car. He has a feeling that she’s trying to look extra nice today, which is fine. He just doesn’t want to be late.

Cas has texted him only once since Dean had called him last Sunday. In the text, he’d suggested a juice bar on the outskirts of Sacramento, as well as a time. Dean had rolled his eyes when he’d seen that—a _juice bar_. It was just the kind of place you could have expected Sam to be constantly patronizing.

Jess is excited about the juice bar, too. She seems to be endlessly interested in the spare details of Cas she can pull out of Dean, not that Dean has many. They both already know that he’s an accountant from Chico. And now Jess knows about the special diet Cas has to be on, post-op, that he can’t drink coffee but, to Dean’s knowledge, he can apparently drink juice. That he might be training to run a marathon, for all Dean knows. And also that he’s a very forgiving person—not that Dean had said that. Jess had intuited it.

“That’s so kind of him to go out of his way to see us again,” Jess had said, that day when she found out about the meeting with Cas. Dean might have creatively edited the whole scenario, leaving out the details about the van and Andy and Tracy and a spectacularly drunk voice mail. In this version, he decided to be the bigger man, and he called Cas—perfectly sober, of course—to apologize. And then Cas had suggested they meet up again, and everything after that was basically truthful.

Dean’s startled from his thoughts when he hears the front door of Jess’s house slam shut—only a few moments later, she’s sliding into the passenger seat. Her hair is loose around her shoulders in all its curling glory, and she’s in a colorful dress.

“I see,” Dean says, putting the Impala into drive. “I didn’t know I was chauffeuring you on a date.”

“Shut up, Dean,” Jess says, beaming.

The drive seems much shorter this time, now that he has company in the car. Jess ejects his tapes and makes him listen to _modern artists_ , but he has to admit that some of the stuff is a little catchy. It’s fun watching Jess mouth along to the lyrics as they blaze down the sunny highway. It puts him in mind of a road trip—maybe they can plan one, coordinate some vacation days off—it’s the kind of fun, carefree adventure that they haven’t let themselves let loose for, not in the longest time.

Jess is practically hanging out the window, like an overgrown, excitable golden retriever, by the time they reach Sacramento city limits. It’s like she thinks she’ll recognize Cas—walking down the sidewalk, waiting to cross the street. Her excitement is _almost_ contagious.

“Jess, get back in here before you fall out of the car,” he says.

“Make me,” she shoots back, and sticks out her tongue.

Okay, so maybe Dean is a _little_ …something. He doesn’t know if excited is the right word. Honestly he’s still surprised that he’s here again, in Sacramento, en route to Castiel Novak. And maybe a little nervous, too, since he went on a Christian Bale-esque rant the last time he saw him. And maybe he’s slightly curious. It’s been two months. He wonders if Cas has changed at all from the guy he met before— the slightly awkward person with seemingly no plans for his life beyond quietly resuming his accounting job.

They’re a few minutes late getting to the juice bar, since Dean has to drive around a bit to find parking—Jess nearly breathing down his neck for that whole ordeal—so by the time they’re walking up to the building, Jess is just kinda powerwalking ahead of him, even though she doesn’t have a clue as to what Cas looks like.

Jess and him stand together just inside the door, getting their bearings, and Jess is craning her head around, saying, “Is he here?” and then a man in a button-down and jeans stands up from his table, waving a little awkwardly, and Dean doesn’t even have to point Cas out to Jess. Jess sees him, and then she’s walking briskly towards him, hair bouncing with every step. Dean just watches: Jess smiling, laughing, throwing her arms around Cas’s shoulders. Cas, pulled down a little by her embrace, his baffled expression half-hidden by her hair. Finally, he lifts a hand and gingerly pats it on her back, returning her hug.

And Dean—Dean can hardly look at him, how thrown Cas is by Jess’s enthusiasm, or the small, pleased, self-conscious smile that spreads across his face before he meets Dean’s eye and it slowly dies away. Right. Because Dean’s pretty effective at ending those made-for-TV, feel-good moments, anyways. He clears his throat and steps forward.

“Cas, this is Jess,” he says, gesturing between them, not that it’s necessary. “Jess, Cas.”

Jess disentangles herself and steps back so she can look into Cas’s face. They’re pretty similar in height, really—basically eye to eye. Cas still seems a bit dazed from all the attention.

“Cas,” Jess says. “Oh my God, it’s so nice to finally meet you.”

“It’s—it’s so nice to meet you, too,” Cas says. He looks a little bereft without the trench coat he was wearing last time, but now Dean can see the leanness of him. He looks like he’s lost weight since their last meeting—his face is even less rounded, now, with more noticeable cheekbones. Dean nudges his way in there before he loses his courage and he pats Cas a few times on the shoulder in what he hopes comes across as a bracing, no-hard-feelings kind of way.

“Hey, man,” he says. “How was the drive down?”

“It was okay,” Cas says. He seems to be distracted by which one of them he should look at. “Would you like to—?”  He gestures over his shoulder.

They get in line. Dean’s able to downplay the whole weirdness of the situation because he can now study the menu like his life depends on it. He’s never been so interested in organic juices his whole life, but here he is, pretending to be utterly enraptured by the calorie content. Jess is murmuring something to Cas—they’re in front of Dean, heads tipped together close together, and Cas says something that makes Jess snort. It’s bizarre.

“Can I have…thepurpleprotector,” Dean mumbles, when it’s his turn to order.

“Sir?”

“The Purple Protector,” Dean grits out. He unwillingly hands over his credit card. But, when he gets that plum-colored monstrosity in return, he has to admit it isn’t half-bad. Even if it is organic and less than one hundred calories and stuffed with weird vegetables. He wanders over to where Jess and Cas are settling into their chairs.

“—at Alta Bates Medical Center, I’ve been there about three years now,” Jess is saying. “I really love it.”

“It must be nice to love what you do,” Cas says. His eyes shyly flick over to Dean. “And you—what do you do, Dean?”

“I’m a mechanic,” Dean says. “Just at a local shop. Nothing fancy.”

“Dean told me you might be running some marathons, Cas,” Jess says. Cas tears his eyes away from Dean.

“Oh,” he says. “That’s still a little too ambitious. But my doctors strongly recommend regular cardio, so I’ve been hiking whenever I can. Some swimming, too.”

Jess starts telling Cas about a time she went hiking near Chico. She’s very good at putting Cas at ease, Dean notices. She touches his arm when she talks, smiles like she told an inside joke, just for the two of them. Cas unconsciously lifts his lurid green juice cup and takes a sip from the straw as he listens, avid. And Dean suddenly finds his attention shifting to Cas’s lips, wide and soft-looking, wrapped around the straw. Cas’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. Dean desperately tries to jerk his attention away but doesn’t know what else to look at—his delicate-looking eyelashes, maybe, brushing his cheeks as he looks down and smiles at something Jess just said? The subtle lines that fan from the corners of his eyes when he does that?

“I hear you’re back at work, then,” Dean says abruptly, interrupting Jess’s anecdote.

“Yeah, I’m…back,” Cas says. He doesn’t sound wildly enthused about it, but he doesn’t sound like he hates it, either. Just kind of resigned to it.

“It’s good you had a job to return to,” Jess says. “How long have you worked there?”

The answer is, apparently, a long-ass time. He’s now going on ten years with the company. And then, with Jess’s careful questions, Cas reveals that he always meant to travel to Europe, but he got the job right after college and never had a chance between that and his heart issues. That he volunteers at the soup kitchen on Thursdays. That he’s actually from Illinois, but that he moved to Chico in the first place to care for his dad, who had long been absent and passed away a few years after he and Cas reunited.  And then he tells them that he was only in California in the first place because he got his MBA from none other than Stanford University. They compare dates—not that it’s like he and Sam ever would have crossed paths. When Cas was at school there, Sam was still a lanky teenager trying to figure out how to unhook a girl’s bra. But still. Dean can tell that Jess is struck by it, too.

“It’s just weird to think about,” she says. “You and Sam might have sat at the same chair in the library, years apart, you know? I think Sam even took an Econ intro class as an elective. Maybe that professor even knew you, or something.”

“Yes, I thought it was strange, too,” Cas says, his eyes darting between the two of them. He seems a bit uncomfortable now that the subject is on Sam. Not that Dean blames him. He remembers what happened the last time they talked about Sam.

But Jess is here, this time. And Jess takes Cas’s hand and presses it between her fingers. “I’m not surprised. I bet the more we get to know you, the more we’ll find you two had stuff in common.”

“Really?” Cas says, unsure.

“Yeah. I mean, you guys both moved from the Midwest to here for school, and you are both interested in _helping_ people— you’re _good_ at it. And obviously you both are really smart. And Sam—Sam just had such, such a _passion_ for life.”

Cas’s expression falters on that sentence. He looks strangely disappointed, his eyes dropping away from Jess’s face. And it’s not like Jess can string up a bunch more comparisons, either; she just met the guy. Dean doesn’t know what compels him to speak up.

“Sam had,” he says, and then stops, because he doesn’t know where he was going with that. But now both pairs of eyes are focused on him. Slowly, he says, “Sam had a lot of _heart_.” Jess’s mouth twists with a wry smile. And Cas just stares, holding his gaze.

And maybe Dean knows what to say, after all. “A lot of heart,” he repeats. He bumps his juice cup into Cas’s. “I think you’ll get there, too.”

Dean doesn’t know what to make of this moment, a second chance with the guy who has his brother’s heart beating in his chest, his brother’s fiancée sitting close beside him. Maybe it’s benediction. Maybe it’s closure. Maybe it’s something else entirely.  

Cas clears his throat. “I’d like to learn more about Sam,” he says. Jess smiles and nudges Dean with her elbow.

“Tell Cas about that time there was a clown running in the same 5K,” she says. She turns to Cas. “That story is just, like, quintessential _Sam_.”

And Dean does.

**

Later, when Dean’s getting his bed covers situated in the dark of his room, he finds himself thinking back over the day.

He knows by now that these kinds of reunions can have strong emotion attached to them. His own flare-up on Cas is proof enough. But also those videos on YouTube, the ones with the families hugging and crying over the donor recipient, are entirely plausible. And now he knows there can be other emotions, too.

The familiarity that came with telling anecdotes about Sam, easy in a way that not many things had been easy, lately. Cas laughing helplessly, mouth wide, nose crinkling, over Dean’s story about Sam. The way Jess sighed and wiped her wet eyes and excused herself to the bathroom, coming back a few minutes later to announce, “I’m so fucking happy.” The way, sitting there with the two of them, reminiscing about Sam, Dean felt like the fourth chair at the table, the empty one, wasn’t so empty, after all.

The way Cas flushed pink when Jess hugged him when they stood up to go, turning her head into his chest to rest her ear there.

“That’s a good heart you got in there,” she had said.

And the nervous, bright feeling that came with shaking Cas’s hand goodbye, the way Cas’s fingers lingered on his wrist, the way Cas looked over his shoulder at them as he walked away, like Jess and Dean standing outside the juice bar, seeing him off, was a picture he didn’t want to forget.

**

Garth’s got himself in hot water again.

Dean’s still shrugging into his coveralls when he hears Tracy say, in a frighteningly calm voice, “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Dean hurriedly zips it up the rest of the way and hurries out into the bay, where he sees Tracy leaning over the hood of a car she’s been working on, her eyes narrowed at Garth, who’s next to her.

“Just, you know,” Garth says, still smiling unflappably. “You’re not like other girls.”

Tracy rolls her eyes and slams the hood of the car. “All right, Garth—no harm done, but for future reference, I’d just rather you keep those kind of opinions to yourself.”

Garth shrugs uneasily. “It was just a complim—”

“No, it wasn’t, not really,” Tracy says. “Because you either mean that other girls aren’t like _me_ , which is saying that—what? No other girls know basic car maintenance? Or you’re saying that _I’m_ not like other girls, and I’m gonna set you straight on that one. I can drink beers with the boys and know how to change out a carburetor and guess what—I can still be just as girly as I want to. So if you think saying that I’m not a girl is a compliment, I’m not taking it that way.”

Garth’s eyes are very wide at this point.

“So, are we on the same page?” Tracy says.

“Yeah, definitely,” Garth whispers. Tracy nods and turns away and then Garth says, “But, you see, what I _really_ meant—”

“Hey, Tracy,” Dean calls out, before Garth gets himself absolutely annihilated. “Mind giving me a hand over here?”

Tracy comes over, shaking her head and wiping her oil-smeared hands on a towel. “What’s up, chief?”

“Actually, nothing, dude was just about to put his foot in his mouth again.”

Tracy laughs. “Okay. Well, maybe in that case, you can help me with something. That V10 Touareg just came in to replace the chargers—gotta take the whole engine out—and Bobby says it’s a job for two.”

That only takes fuckin’ forever. Dean half-wishes that Tracy would have asked Garth to be her number two, although he realizes she probably didn’t want to hear Garth fumbling out excuses for the rest of her shift. It’s a relief when he gets to grab lunch in the break room; he checks his phone while he eats and finds that he has two text messages. One’s from Charlie, asking him to hang out soon. He texts back to ask for her schedule. The second one is from Cas—and there’s no accounting for the warm spread that goes straight through Dean’s stomach, like he just swallowed hot soup, when he sees Cas’s name. And that’s even before he sees what Cas has texted him. He thumbs into the inbox.

_Dean, thank you again for reaching out to me. I had a wonderful day with you two._

He just stares down at it for a minute. He hadn’t expected Cas to reach out to him—at least, not so soon. But there’s something that appeals to Dean there, that Cas was thinking about him, that Cas had a _wonderful time_  with them. Dean’s definitely been feeling a little less heavy since that second meet-up with Cas. He’s glad to see it runs both ways.

_No problem man_

But that doesn’t seem enough. So after another few seconds Dean tacks on:

_Maybe we can do it again sometime_

Which just sounds awful and horrendous and cheesy. He grunts and puts his phone down, but it vibrates almost right away. He picks it back up again. Cas just wrote,

_Please._

Something about that makes Dean feel so nervous-excited and so somehow _sad_ for the dude that he can’t explain it. He’s distracted by Bobby walking past the break room, looking in and then double-taking.

“What are _you_ so pleased as punch for?” Bobby asks suspiciously.

“Just got good news, is all,” Dean says, trying to play it cool by taking a big bite of his sandwich.

“Hmm,” Bobby says. He pauses to adjust the angle of his ball cap on his head. Finally he says, “Glad to see you smiling, kid.” And he pats Dean’s shoulder on the way out.

**

_August 4th, 2012_

_You probably haven’t even gotten my last letter yet. But I just thought about this._

_I’m wondering if Dad’s ever coming back. You know he’s done this before, too many times to count. But this feels different, somehow. I finally went into his room the other day and you know what? He took that framed picture of Mom with him. Like the cash and the booze and his clothes were all here. He just took the important stuff._

_Some of your stuff is still here, too. I can’t remember if I said that before. Your winter clothes—you said it never even snows where you’re going. That seemed crazy at the time. You used to wear, like, seven layers of clothes in the winter. It was a chore even getting you to go outside, too—you always claimed your hair froze funny. But it was fun—at least, I remember it being fun.  You probably don’t remember this, but Mom gave you a ‘snowman starter kit’ for Christmas when you were little. It was this tin box that she filled with carrots (you know, for the nose), buttons, a pipe. I’m forgetting some of the other stuff. I don’t think we had much money that year, so she was trying to be creative, and you were so excited to use it. My bed was closest to the window, so every morning first thing you’d ask me to look out and see if it had snowed yet. You know what? It never fucking snowed once that entire winter._

_Anyways. I found that tin box in your closet—the lid was all busted up, but there it was. An old pair of ice skates. And a bunch of your ribbons and medals from high school, although those are probably jokes compared to all the awards you’re winning now, right?_

_I might need your lawyer smarts sooner than later because I can’t stay here forever. And if Dad’s MIA I guess that forces me to figure out what to do with the house. I don’t even know where to start. Like the deed’s in Dad’s name. And I don’t know whether I’d be able to sell it or not, or what to do with all this junk, either._

_Let me know if there’s anything at all here you actually want to keep._

_Dean_

**

Not even two weeks have passed before Jess calls Dean up, informing him that he’s coming to dinner on Friday night.

“Cas’ll be there, too,” she tells him.

“What?” Dean demands.

“Cas will be there, too,” she repeats. “I got his number when we were in Sacramento…why? Will that be a problem with you?”

“A problem? Why would it be a problem?” Dean says.

“Sure,” she says. “Whatever you say. You’ve just been weird about him before. But he was really excited that I called him, okay? He hasn’t been back to Berkeley since college.”

Dean doubts that Cas is supposedly so excited just because he’ll be close to his alma mater. He decides not to mention it, though.

“I’m just not really sure what your angle is with this guy,” Dean says. “Is he going to be here Christmas morning, too?”

“And so what if he is?” Jess says. “I’m trying to have some kind of a relationship with Cas. I would like to be a part of his life. So, for now, that means dinner on Friday.”

“Can’t wait,” Dean says, with as much pep as he can muster, but Jess doesn’t sound too convinced before hanging up.

It’s not like Dean despises the guy, or anything. Hell, contrary to everything he had expected, he even enjoyed the last time they saw each other—he’d even offered to see Cas again, when they were texting. It just still seems too soon, too much of a good thing. At the end of the day, Cas is still a virtual stranger, coming to eat with Jess and Dean in the same seat where Sam would have once sat. Dean can’t help it if it still all feels a bit raw, if he wants to move a bit slower.

That’s not Jess’s prerogative, though. She’s invited Cas to dinner and, what’s more, is setting up the guest room for him when Dean arrives at her house on Friday.

“I didn’t know if he’d want to drive all the way back after dinner,” she says, tucking the corner of a sheet in. “I think this will do in a pinch.”

“Yeah, neat,” Dean says. He holds up the bag in his hand. “I brought wine.”

“Could you put it in the fridge?” She pulls the sheet taut. “And make sure that nothing’s caught fire, while you’re at it?”

The kitchen smells heavenly, not that Dean really recognizes any of what Jess is making. She was big into organic food before, too, so he expects it. But she’s really going all out for this one. He’s trying to get a peek into the oven to see what she’s making when the doorbell rings. Jess clatters down the steps before Dean’s even made it out of the kitchen.

“Cas!” He hears, followed by muffled formalities. The foyer door opens and closes—Dean guesses that would be the sounds of Jess hanging up Cas’s tan trench coat in the closet. Dean rounds the corner to say hi and almost tramples over Cas.

“Whoa,” Dean says articulately. Somehow he manages to grab hold of Cas to keep them both upright and now he’s standing pressed up against him, his hands tight around Cas’s biceps, which have no business being that muscular on such a geeky dude. Cas, meanwhile, had made a little exclamation of surprise, but now he’s just staring up at Dean, close enough that Dean can see the few glints of silver in his stubble, the arrestingly deep blue of his eyes.

Dean breaks out of his Nicholas Sparks moment and lets go of Cas. “Sorry about that,” he says. He rubs his hand over the back of his neck sheepishly. “Uh, hey, Cas. Nice seeing you again.”

“Hello, Dean,” he says. Is it just Dean’s imagination, or do Cas’s cheeks have a ridge of red in them? “It smells wonderful in here.”

“Don’t look at me,” Dean says, gesturing in Jess’s direction. “Can I get you a glass of wine?”

Cas looks apologetic. “It’s not…advised,” he says.

Dean deflates a little bit. “Oh, yeah, okay. What can I get you to drink, then?”

“Water?” Cas suggests. “I’m sorry, I should have told—”

“No worries,” Dean says. “More for me, anyhow.” Jess gives him a reproving look from the other side of the kitchen.

Dinner appears in increments—a small plate of kale salad, some kind of bean soup, delicately seasoned halibut. Cas seems pleased and overwhelmed with the attention to the ingredients—Jess, at least, seems to know what falls inside of Cas’s dietary restrictions. It almost makes him wonder if  Cas and Jess have been talking regularly, on the sly, since they had met in Sacramento. Not that he blames Jess for being thorough. He remembers that night when Jess very first approached him about writing to Cas, telling him statistics about organ rejection in the first year, the sheer number of pills to prevent it. It hadn’t mattered so much to Dean, then. But he hadn’t really known or cared about Cas as a person then, either.  So Dean, who normally doesn’t eat like this, just holds his tongue and drinks his wine.

“—See, I was thinking they _all_ would be fine, but when I was reading up on it, this one website said absolutely no grapefruit is allowed. I meant to ask you if that’s true for any other fruits.”

Cas nods and takes a sip of his water. “Grapefruit can mess with some of the immunosuppressants I’m taking. Although to be honest I’m not even clear on which immunosuppressant it might be messing with.”

“Which ones are you taking?”

Cas starts rattling off a grocery list of pills, all of which sound like sci-fi planets to Dean, but Jess—with her medical background—seems to know what he’s talking about.

“—Neoral, Imuran, Rapamune, Zenapax…” he says. “Oh, Toprol. I finally got off prednisone—”

“Prednisone!” Jess exclaims. “That’s a doozie.”

Cas gives a sliver of a smile. “I’m finally looking like my old self again,” he says, gesturing in the direction of his face. Dean’s glad to at least catch on to one part of this conversation.

“Weight gain?” he asks.

“Among other things,” Cas says.

“It weakens your immune system,” Jess supplies. “You’ve gotta be extra careful for a while, there. More fish?”

“No, thank you,” Cas says.

“Well I think you’re looking great, champ,” Dean says, patting Cas on the bicep. Jess makes some kind of choking noise from her side of the table. Cas, meanwhile, turns a slow, pretty red.

Pretty?

“I gotta go take a leak,” Dean says, and pushes back from the table so fast that it rocks. Once in the bathroom, he groans and leans over the sink. He didn’t think he was _that_ tipsy. Although he did slosh through that wine pretty damn fast. He turns on the tap and starts splashing his face with cold water.

Dean doesn’t know how long he’s in there. At one point there’s a soft knock on the door, and Jess calling his name, but he just grunts that he’ll be out in a minute and her footsteps fade away, back into the kitchen. Eventually he turns off the light and pads towards the kitchen.

Night has fallen since Dean went into the bathroom. The living room is dark, so that the kitchen, where Cas and Jess still sit, is bright as a beacon. Dean was planning on walking right in but something about the cadence of their voices, soft, almost secretive, makes him stop just outside the doorway. He leans against the wall there and listens.

“They…wouldn’t come,” Cas says slowly. “Even when it got bad. I called my mother and told her that if I didn’t get a transplant in the next month or so, I would probably die. It just reached a point…I was so tired. I would be halfway through shaving my face and my strength would give out—I couldn’t even lift my arm to finish. I’d have to stop. A person can’t live like that. And I just accepted that was how it would be—that it was all just going to end.”

Jess murmurs something. Then Cas says, “I wasn’t expecting that call. I thought, you know, I was past the point of return. When they tell you about the transplant, they prep you for the aftermath. That your body might reject the organ anyways. That they’re going to be breaking your breastbone in half in order to perform the surgery, and that alone can take eight to twelve weeks to heal. With the pain, and the drugs, and just how your whole life changes—it’s very overwhelming. But they told me that when I’d come to after the surgery, there would be people there to help me. So I hoped that I’d wake up, with this new life ahead of me, and find my family standing all around the bed. Waiting for me. But I woke up in that hospital room completely alone.”

There’s a long, long silence. Dean stays rooted to the spot.

Jess says, “It’s okay, Cas. It’s okay.”

Cas’s voice is muffled. “I’m just,” he says. “I’m just so very tired of being alone.”

They don’t say anything else. Dean thinks about going in, sitting with them, but something about that feels so intrusive. So instead he goes to the living room couch, and unfolds the afghan laid over the arm of it, and goes to sleep.

**

Dean wakes up the next morning to the sounds of someone walking around upstairs, in the room right above him. It takes him a few seconds to remember that he’s at Jess’s house, sleeping on her couch, with a mantel lined with pictures of Sam right across from him. Which means the guest room is right above him—which means Cas must be awake.

Dean flops around onto his back and listens. The squeak of the bed. The sound of the toilet flushing, the tap turning off and on, off and on. He wonders if Cas is up there, taking some of his daily regimen of pills. Whatever it is, he listens to the sounds of Cas’s early-morning routine and lightly dozes as he does. His eyes snap open when he hears the sound of someone coming down the steps.

Dean squints over to the stairs, where he sees Cas uncertainly stepping down into the hallway. He’s got a backpack over his shoulder, making him look like he’s off for a day at school, and that paired with the crazy hair, stuck up in dark cowlicks all over his head, and the clothing—worn, well-loved jeans, a faded t-shirt—solidifies his appearance of a high student.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean grunts, which make Cas jump. “What’re you up to?”

Cas comes into the living room. “I’m not really sure yet. I should probably leave soon, but…” he glances up the stairs. “I think Jess is still sleeping.”

“Jess could sleep through an EDM concert, so you might have to wait a while,” Dean says. He fumbles around for his phone, and finally finds it stuffed between two of the cushions in the couch. “Also, it’s only eight AM, dude. What’s the rush?”

“Nothing,” Cas says. “I just didn’t want to overstay my welcome.” He’s still hovering over there in the doorway.

Dean raises his eyebrows at Cas. He’s got some dark bags under his eyes, although he always has, the few times Dean’s seen him, so he’s not sure whether that’s a tell that he was up the whole night talking to Jess or not. It wouldn’t really matter, either way. Jess is, like, two steps away from trying to figure out how to fold Cas up into a locket that she can keep forever. Especially with the heart-to-heart last night, he thought Cas would know how very far away he is from even toeing the line of being unwelcome.

“How long is the drive back to Chico?” Dean says instead. “About three hours, right?”

“Just about,” Cas says.

“What’re you gonna do for breakfast, then?”

Cas’s eyebrows wing up. “I’m sure I’ll find something on the road,” he says.

“Not anything that you _should_ be eating, though,” Dean says. He stands up and swivels his torso around to work out the kinks in his back. He’s really too old at this point to be sleeping on couches…or the backs of vans. There’re a few satisfying _pops_ from his spine and then he pads over to Cas and tilts his head in the direction of the kitchen.

“Let’s see what we can rustle up.”

The kitchen still has some of the dirty china sitting in the sink, and the laptop, now closed, on the table where Jess must have been showing Cas pictures of Sam. Dean’s surprised to find he is actually kinda sorry that he missed that. The sun is slanting through the windows, making the table and counters gleam, and it’s pretty much the perfect kind of morning, the kind of morning where Dean might make bacon and waffles, humming along to some Led Zeppelin while bacon fat hisses in the pan. A few minutes of poking through the cabinets and the fridge don’t really yield anything satisfying, though. Jess’s breakfast regimen seems to subsist solely on coffee and nutrition bars. Dean turns back to tell Cas the bad news and almost trips over him—he’s staring into the reflective surface of the window over the kitchen sink, trying to tame his disordered hair. Now he looks like a fluff-up bird, or something, and based on the frown Cas is now wearing, he knows it, too.

“Sorry,” Cas says, even though Dean’s the one currently standing on Cas’s bare foot.

“We’re gonna have to go on a grocery run,” Dean announces.

“We—we what?”

Dean finds his jacket still slung over the back of the chair he sat in last night and fishes around for his keys. “The grocery. Jess was trying to deceive you last night with all that farm-fresh organic crap—everything else around here is Nature Valley, months-old Klondike bars... you know.”

Cas doesn’t look like he knows, at all, what Dean is talking about. But he follows Dean to the front door, dumps his overnight bag and grabs his shoes from the mat—and that’s how Dean and Cas find themselves in the Impala a few minutes later.

“This is a very nice car, Dean,” Cas says.

“Used to be my Dad’s,” Dean says, as he maneuvers them out of the neighborhood. “But it’s been just me and my elbow grease keepin’ her running the past fifteen years. Baby’s taken me all over. When I moved here from Kansas, I drove her straight through. She’s not just flashy—she’s dependable.”

Cas runs his hand along the leather seat. “Yes, I can tell you keep good care of her.”

“What do you drive? I wasn’t even paying attention when we left.”

“It’s, uh, another old-model car,” Cas says.

“Hmm…let’s see. One of those old Camaros? Or maybe you like speed over style. Maybe one of those ’64 Pontiacs?”

“Yeah, kind of,” Cas says.

“Well, don’t make me beg,” Dean says.

Cas sighs. “More like a ’74 Lincoln Continental.”

Dean can’t help his face from scrunching up. “Dude. That’s, like, a pontoon boat with wheels.”

“I happen to quite like it,” Cas says stiffly.

“ _It_? You add insult to injury by calling your car an _it_?”

“Cars don’t have genders, Dean,” Cas says seriously, as they pull into the grocery store parking lot. Dean laughs.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “You’ve got me there.” Cas smiles uncertainly back, but at least he seems a bit more comfortable in Dean’s presence, now. His arm swings close to Dean’s as they walk into the store together.

“All right,” Dean says. He peels off to get a cart. “Lay it on me. What’s the food of the day?”

“What?” Cas says. He’s staring kind of absent-mindedly at Dean’s arms as he pushes the cart back and forth impatiently.

“The food,” Dean says. “Your morning meal. What you break your fast with.”

Cas, looking a little caught out, quickly looks away from Dean. “I normally just have cereal,” he says.

“Dude.”

“It’s good,” Cas says defensively. “And heart-healthy. What were you expecting me to say?”

Dean sighs and starts pushing the cart towards the aisles. “Live a little, man. I’m guessing bacon and sausage are out, right?”

Cas nods. “And nothing with lots of sugar, which takes out donuts or cinnamon rolls.”

“You’re killing me, smalls,” Dean says. They’re silent except for the squeaky wheel on the cart. “How about an old classic. Egg on toast—”

“I can’t have eggs,” Cas interrupts glumly.

“No _eggs_?”

“Not many eggs,” Cas says, correcting himself. “My dietician said I shouldn’t be having more than three eggs or egg yolks a week.”

Dean pulls the cart up short. “How many eggs have you had this week?”

“…None.”

“Cool,” he says. “Egg on toast it is, then.”  Cas opens his mouth like he’s about to argue. “You can have one, Cas. Your doctor even said so. Think of it as a special treat. A celebratory _egg_.”

Cas has a thinking face on for a few moments, and then a slow, goofy grin spreads over his face. “Okay.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Dean squeaks the cart to a stop so he can look over the bread selection. “Toast,” he says. “Or should I say, wheat toast. Gotta keep it healthy.”

“Do you eat wheat toast, Dean?”

“Not normally,” Dean says, pitching a loaf into the cart. “But this is a special occasion, remember?”

“I don’t want to make you—”

“You’re not _making_ me do anything. I offered. It’s a day for both of us to try new things. Let’s see…here we go. Can you grab a few avocados?”

Cas nods and goes to feel some of them for ripeness while Dean selects some bananas nearby. When he gets back, Cas is leaning over the cart, carefully placing his finds in there, and as he does the collar of his t-shirt gapes open enough that Dean can see his scar, or at least the reddened tip of it—the first time he’s seen it since that day at the coffee shop.

Cas looks up, still with a trace of that goofy grin, but it drops away when he sees where Dean’s eyes are focused. He stands straighter and tugs the neck of his shirt up.

Dean waves his hand vaguely towards it. “You, uh,” he says. “You shouldn’t cover it up. Scars can pick up chicks.”

Cas pats his shirt into place. “I’m not interested in ‘picking up’ any ‘chicks,’” he says, with a completely irony-free use of finger quotes.

The next three aisles, not much talking is done. In fact, Dean’s wondering if Cas is mad at him, and then he sees the tight, anxious way that Cas’s eyes are darting over to Dean every few seconds. Like maybe he’s worried about Dean’s reaction—to what, though? That he’s not interested in dating? Or maybe Dean’s reaction to seeing the scar—that physical reminder of the reality of Sam’s heart in Cas’s chest.

“Eggs,” Dean says aloud. “And you know what, some cereal, too. And OJ. You like OJ, right?”

Cas’s shoulders lose some tension. “Right.”

Their last stop is in the cereal aisle. Dean leans over the handle of the shopping cart while Cas carefully looks over the selection available.

“I think I want this one,” Cas says. “Although buying a whole box for just one breakfast seems kind of silly.”

Dean takes the box before Cas can think twice about it and puts it in the cart. “We’ll save it for next time, then.”

“Next time?” Cas’s eyes flick up, hopeful and surprised and _blue_.

“Well _I’m_ not eating it,” Dean says.

In the self check-out line, Cas tries to pay, but Dean hip-bumps him out of the way rather aggressively and manages to slide his credit card before Cas can regroup. Then, each carrying a bag, they head back out to the Impala. Dean lets the radio do the talking for most of the drive home. They’ve fallen into a comfortable kind of silence, anyhow—Cas, with the grocery bags balanced on his lap, Dean tapping out the beat of a song on the steering wheel.

When he parks outside of Jess’s house, he pauses before opening the door, breaking the moment.

“Cas,” he says. “How come your family wasn’t there for you after your surgery?”

Cas doesn’t seem to care that Dean eavesdropped on his conversation last night with Jess; he doesn’t even seem surprised by the question. He lifts his chin, like a challenge, and meets Dean’s gaze.

“Probably for the same reason I’m not interested in picking up chicks,” he says.

It takes a few seconds for Dean to get it. When he does, he grins at Cas and takes one of the bags out of his lap. It’s only _then_ that Cas seems surprised.

“All right, Cas,” he says. “Let’s make some magic.”

**

Either the noise coming from the kitchen or the smells—or maybe both—is eventually enough to lure Jess out of bed. So she’s not there when Dean shows Cas how to poach an egg—creating a mini-whirlpool in a saucepan of water by stirring it with a spoon; gently cracking the egg right into the center of it. She’s not there when Cas, who’s handy with a blade, takes it upon himself to slice up the avocados. She’s not there when Dean, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Cas, reaches an arm around him to lift out the finished eggs with a slotted spoon. She’s not there to see the way bare-foot, rumple-haired, dressed-down Cas smiles at Dean as they move around each other in the kitchen, or the way Dean lets himself smile back.

Conveniently enough, she stumbles downstairs just as Dean’s putting the finishing touches on their plates.

“What—” She says, stopping in the doorway to look at them.

“We made breakfast,” Cas says.

Jess’s eyes travel over him, to Dean, and back again. “I can see that,” she says.

“It’s poached eggs on avocado toast,” Cas says, sliding a plate in front of her. “And also bran cereal with sliced banana, if you want any. And orange juice—”

“OJ,” Dean says.

“And OJ, too,” Cas says. He sits down across from her.

“And you can have all of this?” Jess asks, gesturing at the food covering the table.

“Yeah,” Cas says. The guy’s practically glowing. “I can have it all.”

**

_August 8th, 2012_

_Remember in high school how you were part of the Gay-Straight Alliance Club? I know I made fun of you pretty mercilessly for that. Maybe small-town America does need that kind of support group, I don’t know._

_Actually, I do know. High school was a fucking piece of cake for me. You’re the one who came home with a black eye from a fight. Someone said something stupid and homophobic—to you? About you? I don’t remember—and you snapped. Dad was impressed because you’d won the fight—and he only knew that because the kid whose ass you kicked, his dad came around later, pissed off about a broken nose and a few missing teeth. Compared to that, a shiner is nothing._

_Remember how I taught you to throw a punch? How you shouldn’t tuck your thumb into your fist, in case you break it. And you put all your weight behind your knuckles. You were a fast learner, even then. I don’t know why, at the time, I was more proud of you for throwing a punch—why wasn’t I proud that you were standing up for the right thing?_

_I think you knew, even then. But you haven’t seen me in a few years so you don’t know that I’m not ashamed of it, anymore. I think you would call it ‘finally working through my toxic masculinity.’ Which does have a certain ring to it._

_The weird thing is we never really talked about it. But I’ll say it here—thanks for standing up for me. You always, always did._

_Dean_

_P.S. Dude. That was almost as chick-flick as my first letter. Toxic masculinity, who?_

**

It’s too early to say if it will be a tradition yet. But Cas is grilling “veggie dogs” with a studious frown the Friday next, when Dean shows up after work. He can’t really say he was surprised when he saw the text from Jess, _family dinner_ , and who he knew would be at it. He’s had a few lessons this past year alone  about relinquishing control, since he has little in the first place. And it’s not like Cas being a part of Jess and Dean’s dinners is an intrusion in the same way that having, what, Great-Aunt Mildred over, or Jess’s annoying friend Brady from school. It’s not an intrusion, Dean can at least accept that now. But it is…something. Dean, drinking a glass of tap water in the kitchen, watches through the window as Cas carefully rotates each dog a quarter of an inch.

“Putting the guest to work already?” he says to Jess as she walks into the room.

“I was trying to find the charger,” Jess says, holding a computer cord up in the air. “He said he wanted to see more pictures of Sam and the family.”

She scowls when Dean makes a face. “He _did_! I mean, I’m sure it’s really helpful to see what Sam looked like, what kind of person he was. And you remember how Sam was with his laptop. There’s a million pictures organized into a thousand photo albums—we barely got through one last time.”

“Right,” Dean says. He glances out the window again and sees Cas  cocking his head toward the kitchen, looking in at him. He waves, and Cas, squinting against the glare of the sun in his eyes, waves his tongs back.

“If you, if you want,” Jess says hesitantly, “we can look at them later.”

“Right,” Dean says again. He shrugs. He doesn’t blame Jess for wanting the trip down memory lane, especially if Cas is so interested. For Dean, it would be like binge-eating junk food, or something. It might feel good at the time, seeing all those pictures of his happy, alive, vibrant brother. But he wouldn’t feel good for very long. He thinks he’d go home just feeling hollow and sad— or hollower, sadder.  He’s still just becoming used to being in this house again. “We’ll see how the night goes,” he says. “I’m gonna go check on—”

But then the back door opens and Cas steps into the kitchen. His face is a little red from the heat of the flames, and there’s a bead of sweat working its way down his throat, taking it’s sweet time, like a sight-seeing tourist. Dean watches its slow path into the collar of Cas’s t-shirt with resignation; at this point it would be impossible _not_ to stare.

“Hi, Dean,” Cas says, standing just at the threshold there. Dean realizes only then that he hasn’t met Cas’s eye this entire time since Cas opened the door; he’s just been staring intently in the area of Cas’s collarbone. Jess glances between them.

“How’s dinner coming along?” Dean asks, repositioning his lean against the counter so Cas can come up next to him. Cas smiles and, after a beat, comes to stand beside him.

“Hopefully it’s edible,”  Cas says. He rubs a charcoal smudge on his arm. “I really only came in to have a glass of water.”

“Shit, sorry, Cas,” Jess says. “Let me grab you one—”

“You ever grilled out before?” Dean says. Cas shakes his head. “Really? Damn, dude. I’m surprised. You were, like, Mastercheffing out there. Mister Grill Master. I thought you had _credentials_.”

He doesn’t know why he tells stupid jokes when he’s nervous. It’s not like Cas is standing _that_ close to him, or that Cas is doing anything to make him nervous. Okay, fine, fine. If Dean’s being honest, Cas is far in left field of Dean’s comfort zone at this point, but not for the reasons most people might think. And Dean would really rather not think about those reasons at the present moment, either. It’s weird enough having Cas easily leaning against the counter next to him, occupying the same space Sam once did.

“Shut up, Dean,” Jess groans, rolling her eyes at him. “And do something useful, would you? Set the table or something.” She thrusts a glass into Cas’s hands.

“Drive down wasn’t too bad?” Dean says. “I’m surprised you’ve done it twice in one week.”

Cas looks a little caught out. “It’s not awful,” he says. “I, uh, I really don’t have much going on Friday nights, anyways.”

“You do now,” Dean points out. “Family dinners are always on Fridays.”

“Dean, the table setting, please?”

Cas is giving him this hopeful, grateful look, one that he just gave Dean a few minutes ago, when he was standing on the threshold of the doorway, or even last week, or even in Sacramento, as he walked away from them. Dean isn’t sure he deserves it. But, giving Cas a quick grin as he sidesteps him to grab dishes from the cabinet, he can’t say he doesn’t like it. Not at all.

**

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, business is dead slow, and Dean is currently having his ass kicked by Charlie on Words with Friends. He’s happy when Andy walks by, calling, “You’ve got a visitor, Winchester!”

His visitor turns out to be a ’74 Lincoln Continental, gold-colored, about the size of Moby Dick. Cas pops his head a bit sheepishly out the window.

“Hi,” he says. “Hope I’m not bothering you.”

“Kinda my job,” Dean says. He’s trying to look all cool and unaffected, like Cas comes by work all the time or something—which he doesn’t. Cas has been back to visit at least three times since the first dinner at Jess’s last month. Typically he’ll bring the ingredients, and Jess or Dean (or, one disastrous time that has not since been repeated, Jess _and_ Dean) will show him how to cook it. Sometimes he has to step out to call his dietician to double check with an ingredient. Overall, though, they’ve had some pretty damn good successes with those dinners. And pretty much always, on Jess’s invitation, Cas will spend the night in her guest room. Cas will always try to politely decline first, but he eventually gives in. Dean still remembers how flustered the guy got when Jess showed him the toothbrush she bought for him, to be kept in the spare bedroom’s bathroom.

But Dean can’t pretend that Cas has ever been here, to his work, where he’s dressed in what he knows is a pretty form-fitting pair of coveralls, and some dark unidentified substance—motor oil?—that Tracy had smeared across his face ‘by accident.’ And, to be honest, Dean’s a little surprised, because Cas is hardly one to be forward in their—relationship, or whatever it is. He doesn’t come to Berkeley unless Jess invites him. He doesn’t even seem very comfortable for the first few minutes after he arrives, either, always looking at them closely like he’s making sure they really want him there.

And—no, Dean shouldn’t even be thinking about it—he can’t help it. Cas has never been one to initiate contact. It’s not like Dean _plans_ to, or even means to. But he finds himself clapping Cas on the shoulder, you know, in the friendly way. Nudging Cas a little to the left or right so he can reach into a cabinet or a drawer. Firmly clasping Cas’s hand goodbye every time Dean leaves, after dinner, to drive back home. (Jess just told him, the other day, how she appreciates how much he’s loosened up around Cas. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased she noticed or take it as a personal warning that he’s been a bit too touchy-feely lately.) But Cas has never shown himself to be equally comfortable around Dean, at least not in that way.

But Dean shouldn’t even be thinking about that.

“Don’t tell me you drove all the way here for an oil change,” Dean says, coming over to lean against the side of Cas’s car.

Cas’s hair is wet now, from the drizzle, curling damply over his forehead. “I was in the area,” Cas says defensively. “You came highly recommended.”

“Oh I did, did I?” Dean laughs. Cas is squinting up at him, like he isn’t sure he’s being made fun of or not, so Dean decides not to give him too hard of a time. He raps his knuckles on the hood of the car. “Pull it into the garage, okay? Then we can check out the goods.”

“Yes, okay,” Cas says. He shifts back into his seat, puts his hands carefully at ten and two, and then pokes his head back out in confusion. “We?”

“Yep,” Dean says. “What? You didn’t think you could just sit there and look pretty while I did all the work, did you?”

There’s that word again. _Pretty_. What the fuck, Dean Winchester.

“Uh,” Cas says eloquently.

“All right. See you in there. In a second. All right, then.” Dean jogs off towards the bay, rubbing furiously at his motor-oil cheek as he does. Tracy gives him a what’s-going-on face but he waves her away. By the time Cas carefully follows him in—with a concentrated face, like he’s defusing a bomb, not driving a car in a straight line—Dean thinks that he’s got himself under control.

Cas turns the car off, gets out, gets back in, pops the hood, and then climbs out again. Dean gestures for him to come stand next to him.

“Okay,” he says, looking at the behemoth of an engine spread out before him. “What’s what, in here?”

Cas gives him a long-suffering look and slowly points. “The, uh, spark plug.”

“Dude, that’s the _horn_.”

Cas just shrugs.

“Hey,” Dean says. “Guess what _this_ is called.”

Cas leans over the engine to look at it more closely. “The, uh, belt…hose. No, wait, it’s the belt—”

“It’s the fuel return _nipple_ ,” Dean says. “Ha! Toldja a car can be a lady, didn’t I?”

Cas doesn’t look nearly as impressed as he should. “Dean, men have nipples, too,” he says.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says. It takes a few seconds for the wind to return to his sails. “Anyways. Should have known my knowledge would just be wasted on you. _Spark plug_.”

He gestures over to the break room. “You see that room over there? Find one of the spare coveralls and put in on. You’re gonna be my assistant.”

Cas looks at the break room suspiciously. Even from here, they can see Andy in there, throwing Cheetos in the air and trying to catch them in his mouth.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to—”

“Hey, relax, okay? We don’t have a single customer here. My coworkers don’t care. Are you gonna make me wait all day, or what?”

For a second there it looks like Cas is gonna flat out say no—Dean even starts to turn back to the engine, to get this show on the road. But Cas trudges off with a last, sad look at his Continental. While he’s gone, Dean tinkers around the engine a little bit. Honestly, he wouldn’t be surprised if Cas had never taken his car for an oil change, like _ever_. But the engine is surprisingly okay. If Dean had all the time and money in the world, he could probably have a fun few weeks returning it to its original glory. But that’s all right. He can work with what’s here.

Dean looks up to see Cas shaking Tracy’s hand, still over by the break room. Garth is circling around, too. Dean’s coworkers are too nosy for their own good. The good news is that Cas has the pair of coveralls on—which, really, Dean had kind of meant as a joke, he thought Cas might put his foot down at some point—

Dean realizes he’s admiring the fit of it around Cas’s thighs a little _too_ much and quickly looks away.

“Guys, can you stop distracting my right-hand man?” he yells. Tracy shoots him a middle finger and wanders off. A few seconds later, Cas is next to him again, running his hands down the flat front of his coveralls a little self-consciously.

“The good news, or bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that with a little bit of a tune-up, your car will probably be drivable for the next few years at least.”

“Right,” Cas says, a smile playing around his mouth.

“So. Here’s the plan. We’re gonna change your oil, test your battery, check the spark plugs and filters, top off your coolant, lube you up, and then you can hit the road. Sound good?”

Maybe Dean is _kinda_ glad that his blasé mechanic-speak had such an effect. Cas suddenly seems much more interested in the engine than he was before. His ears look a little red. “And then… what?”

Dean, about to grab for the tool cart, pauses.

“Then,” Dean says, “you’ll practically be good as new.”

**


	3. Part III

**Part III**

Truth be told, Dean’s a little nervous. Cas has come down to Berkeley a time or ten but this is the first time Dean’s returned the favor.

To be honest, he can’t quite remember how the offer came about, either. He thinks it might have been one of those times when Jess was somewhere else—using the bathroom? Taking a phone call? He and Cas had been on the back porch, leaning against the porch railing. Cas seemed content with the silence, rolling his glass of water between his palms as he looked out over the yard, but Dean had felt antsy.

“Got any other plans when you’re back in Chico tomorrow?” Dean had asked. He _wasn’t_ going to ask Cas to hang out in Berkeley longer tomorrow if it turned out he had no other plans for the day. It was just an innocent question.

“Maybe I’ll go hiking,” Cas said. He hadn’t seemed to find anything strange with Dean’s line of questioning. “I try to go at least once a week. There are lots of places to hike around Chico, once you know how to look for them.”

“Hiking, huh?” Dean looked at Cas out of the corner of his eye. “That sounds fun.”

Cas very deliberately did not look anywhere in the vicinity of Dean. “You are more than welcome to come along some time,” he said to the back yard as a whole. “If you want to.”

“Yeah,” Dean said immediately, surprising himself, because the farthest he had ever hiked was to the 7/11 down the street from Bobby’s shop when he was suddenly craving a Pepsi.

“You—you do?” Cas had said, surprised, and the glass suddenly popped out of his hands and fell,  shattering on the deck. Shards, like ice, went spinning across the wood. “Oh, shit,” Cas said, the curse rough in his mouth. He started to kneel down and then Dean was at his elbow, the glass crunching beneath his boots, pulling him upright.

“Dude, it’s fine,” he said. “Don’t pick it up with your bare hands.”

“Sorry, I—”

“I’ll grab a broom. Look, you’re not even wearing shoes. Are you okay?”

Cas had looked down at his socked feet, like he’d forgotten about them, and then at his elbow, with Dean’s hand curled tightly around it, and then up into Dean’s face. The light was falling, so maybe Dean’s eyes were playing tricks on him, but it seemed like Cas was looking right at Dean’s lips. Which were, maybe, hovering right by his cheek.

“I,” Cas had said breathlessly. Dean’s head had tilted a little closer—to hear the guy, since he was talking so goddamned soft all of a sudden. And then Jess had burst out through the back door and Dean had quickly turned away to warn her about not stepping on any glass. And no, he hadn’t been entertaining any fantasies of fireman-carrying Cas and his delicate feet over the shards of glass and to safety.

And maybe Dean had texted Cas later that week about hiking the following Saturday. And maybe Dean doesn’t want to spend a lot of time lingering on why they didn’t mention this plan to Jess, who would certainly be free to come.

(Okay. Dean’s not gonna spend a lot of time lingering on this, either—but. There’s been a weird kind of electric _something_ in the air lately. He’s pretty sure he’s the only one who notices it—it’s very _subtle_ —and he thinks it’s been going on ever since Cas came to visit him at work. Boy, was Bobby not thrilled when he found out about that later—bitched like you wouldn’t believe about letting customers go places where they shouldn’t—but it’s been worth it, anyways.)

(And also—totally not lingering—Dean hasn’t had that electric kind of feeling in a long, long time. After Sam died, he really wasn’t interested in things like that, things like sex. It was too exhausting to even think about. Not that he’s thinking about that—like, _sex_ -sex, when it comes to Cas. It’s just that he feels this weird spark, this sense of being _alive_ , that seems to be reminiscent of the Dean of before, the Dean who could give and enjoy pleasure. So it’s not necessarily sexual. It’s more like the _precursor_ to feeling anything sexual. And it just only happens when he’s around Cas.)

Anyways. The drive to Chico really is quite beautiful. Cas has been texting him intermittently over the week with ideas for different trails, as well as his reasons for axing a few of those options ( _Never mind about Bidwell Park. Mountain lion attack. Mountain lions are not good for cardio.)_ Dean’s pretty much been agreeable to everything Cas has sent him. At the end of the day, he has no strong feelings about the incline of the trail or what kinds of birds they might see. He’s just looking forward to a long, solitary hike in the beautiful mountain vistas of Chico, California with his friend, as friends do.

Chico itself is kind of small, nothing like Berkeley, so it’s not too hard finding the house on Greydove Lane. The house is kind of like Cas’s car, really. A bit of an older model. A bit run down. But nothing that some love and elbow grease wouldn’t fix. Dean flips his sunglasses up to look at it as he walks up the sidewalk. Besides being in need of a new coat of paint, it’s pretty, in a quaint kind of way. A large front porch, flowerboxes beneath the windows. There doesn’t seem to be a second floor but the roof does come up in a peak, with a small stained glass window beneath the eaves, that makes him think there might be an attic room or something.

And then there’s Cas, swinging the door open before Dean’s even set foot on the porch stairs.

“Hi, Dean,” he says. He’s wearing a pair of running shorts and a sad, faded excuse for what used to be a U of Illinois shirt. Sulkily, Dean is annoyed that the look seems to be a natural fit for Cas—it’s bad enough that the guy can pull off accountant professional-wear, too. As if Dean’s not self-conscious enough about his pasty bowlegs. “Welcome to Chico.”

“Thanks,” Dean says. He goes to put his hand on the railing and then sees all the potential splinters waiting to happen, and thinks better of it. “We gonna talk all day, or get cracking?”

Cas looks back into his house. “Let me grab the supplies,” he says. _Supplies_ ends up being what Dean could best call a fanny pack. Cas shoots him a look that pretty much dares him to say anything about it, so he doesn’t. Instead, they walk back to the Impala and Dean follows Cas’s direction north, out of Chico, and towards something called Lassen Volcanic National Park. The drive is longer than Dean anticipated; he thought Cas would be sticking close to home in his hikes. But apparently he decided to do something really adventurous for this trip.

Once they’re there, Cas slides some sunscreen out of his fanny pack and eyeballs him until Dean reluctantly slathers some on his face and arms. Cas does the same. Then he puts on a tattered baseball hat, sunglasses, and slides his fanny pack around so it’s resting just over the curve of his ass, and attaches the clips on the bottom around his thigh, almost like a holster. Suddenly it’s a lot less funny looking than it was before.

“Ready?” Cas says, looking up.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Hiking. Nature. The great outdoors.”

What Cas failed to mention was that this hiking trail was not going to be like the woodsy bike paths or scenic mountain fields Dean was anticipating. They’re walking on a kind of boardwalk through what looks like some kind of post-apocalyptic world of the scorched earth variety, which is a weird offset to the mountains that rise on either side of them, some that even have snow still reflecting bright white from the sun.

“Uh, Cas,” Dean says. “What did you say this place is called again?”

“Lassen Volcanic National Park,” Cas says. “This is a three mile trail—relatively easy—called the Bumpass Hell trail.”

“Bumpass,” Dean says flatly. “Bumpass _Hell_ trail.”

“Yes, ha ha,” Cas says flatly. Dude’s been getting his snark on lately. “It has two profane words in the name.”

“Dude. If you want people to hike your trail, don’t call it after the satanic pit of the underworld, maybe—”

“Dean, stop being an assbutt about the name,” Cas says. Dean mouths out the word, _assbutt_ , at Cas’s back petulantly, but then Cas turns around and hands him a bottle of water to drink from. “It’s named after Kendal Bumpass. He discovered the hot springs in the 1800s, apparently by accident. He stepped in one and lost his leg.”

“Well that’s just lovely,” Dean mutters. It’s a lot hotter than he was originally banking for, and there’s no cloud cover or shade to speak of. He already feels a trickle of sweat working its way down the back of his neck. He starts to understand the _hell_ part of the name by the time they’re near the hydrothermal springs, which have steam rising from them dramatically, as well as having a strong sulfurous smell.

Cas, meanwhile, is walking ahead of him, with the fanny pack swinging from his hip, which is now looking less like Extreme-Couponer-Mom and more like Something-Indiana-Jones-Would-Wear.

“You hiked here before?” Dean asks.

“Once or twice,” Cas answers. He slows down his steps so that Dean and him are walking side by side. “It’s closed for most of the winter and spring because of how deep the snow gets.”

“Gotcha.” Dean spends a few moments looking down, over the side of the boardwalk, at one of the springs, which is a vibrant blue-silvery color he’s never seen anywhere else in nature.

“It doesn’t do anything for me,” Cas says, abruptly. Dean turns and sees Cas waving his hand vaguely at the scenery around them. “When I got stronger, after the surgery, I thought hiking would be a good idea. Communing with nature—kind of like communing with God, right? So I’ve tried a new place every time. Mountains, waterfalls, sulfur springs…I don’t _feel_ anything. At least, not like I should.”

This is new territory for Dean. Cas has only ever talked to Jess about the personal, Jess with her kind eyes and soft hands. He’s not sure where this is coming from.

“You wanted some religious experience on Bumpass Hell trail?”

Cas shakes his head. “I wanted _something_. Forget faith…I lost that a long time ago. But I can’t tell you how many people have told me since my transplant—that there was a _reason_. That God gave me a second chance, that there was something he still needed me to live for. It’s a nice sentiment, at least.”

“But you don’t believe it,” Dean says.

“I’m…I’m not sure what I am,” Cas says. He pauses to lift the neck of his shirt and wipe his face with it. “It all comes back to the fact that I shouldn’t be alive. I really shouldn’t. I’m not even sure I deserve it.”

“Hey,” Dean says.

Cas snaps his mouth shut, like he realizes that he’s said something too much, too personal. But then he’s talking again, like he can’t even stop himself: “Most days, I don’t feel like I do. I don’t know what kind of hospital politics were in place that night I got the call. I’d been on the wait list for a heart for five months, you know, and there are people who have been on there for much longer. So here I am, with a heart someone else should have rightfully gotten— _your_ brother’s heart—”

Dean grimaces. He’s been trying not to think about that, lately.

“For what? So I can go back to punching numbers as an accountant?” Cas’s voice is flat.

“Cas, man, no one expected you to come back and win the Nobel prize—”

“I just don’t feel like it’s enough,” Cas says. “Maybe everything’s that’s left is just—”

Dean rounds on him. “Just what?”

“—Penance.”

It’s eerily silent on the trail. Cas is trying to look around him, through him—at the scrubby pine trees, the steam billowing up besides them from a spring, but Dean isn’t having it.

“So having a shitty job is penance,” Dean says. “The pills you have to take and the food you have to eat—exercise is just daily maintenance, right? You don’t actually _care_. That’s all just _penance_.”

Dean can’t see his eyes, since Cas is wearing sunglasses, but he can see how tight Cas’s jaw is right now, the muscle moving in his cheek when he grits his teeth.

“Hold up,” Dean says. “Meeting with me and Jess—was _that_ penance?”

“That’s not—” Cas says lamely.

“ _J_ esus, man.”

“It’s not like that,” Cas says stiffly. “It’s been made perfectly clear that Sam—that Sam should be the one—”

“Made clear by who? By _me_?” Cas doesn’t say anything, which Dean takes to be an affirmative. “That was _months_ ago, Cas. I was still grieving, I was angry—” Now he’s struggling to remember just what he said in the coffee shop. “Man, I don’t exist to pleasure your self-masochism boner, all right? You wanna make yourself feel bad, fine. But don’t hang around me if that’s the case—do it on your goddamn own.”

“ _You_ …shouldn’t be hanging around just for _me_ ,” Cas says slowly, which who knows the hell what that’s supposed to mean. Only that Dean didn’t manage to really get through to him, that’s for sure. Cas frowns and sidesteps Dean. “I can’t talk about this with you.”

“Dude, what—”

He tries to catch Cas’s arm but Cas just shrugs him off. He’s nearing a curve in the boardwalk and Dean’s doing nothing to stop him.

“Fuck!” Dean’s got half a mind to just march straight back to the car. He really could. He’d be back in the Impala in less than twenty minutes, leaving this fucking hellhole and Cas and his awful revelations here where they belong.

Except he can’t do that. Just strand Cas here. He looks at Cas again, at the dark line of sweat sticking his shirt between his shoulder blades, at his slumped posture. _Penance_. Cas walks like he’s holding the whole weight of the world on his shoulders.

He lets Cas have a bit of a head start. After a while he starts walking the trail behind him, stopping to look out over the landscape every so often—bubbling water, sometimes white, sometimes orange, the bleached, rocky hills. He finally catches up with Cas near the end of the trail, overlooking a wide lake ruffled with waves. Just seeing it reminds Dean of how thirsty he is.

Wordlessly, Cas hands him a water bottle. They stay there for a few minutes, Dean drinking, aware of sweat in the most unimaginable places, how the tips of his ears are feeling especially crispy-hot right now.

Dean isn’t sure what to say to Cas, so in the end, he just hands the water bottle back to him and they turn around, walking back along the hell trail, through the steam and bubbling springs, back to the car.

**

Trust Dean Winchester to take a fucked up situation and make it even worse.

It happens when they get back to Cas’s house. Cas is already raring to go, with his hand on the handle and everything, but Dean doesn’t unlock the doors for him just yet.

“Cas…” he says.

He still isn’t really sure what to say, or how to say it. He feels stupid—or maybe Cas was just that good at hiding it—for not knowing that any of this stuff was preying on Cas this whole time. That anything _he_ could have said would have added to it.

Cas stares straight ahead, through the windshield, and doesn’t move or say anything when Dean touches him gently on the arm.

“Can’t we talk about this? You can’t just—just say stuff like that, and pretend it never happened.”

“I apologize,” Cas says stiffly. “I didn’t mean to drag you into my problems.”

“Well, let’s start there. _Our_ problems, Cas. I thought it was pretty clear we’re in the same boat, now.”

“Are we?” But Dean would like to think he knows Cas well enough to figure out some of his tells. And Cas’s voice is slightly, just slightly, trembling.

“Talking about penance, here, Cas,” Dean says, even though Cas flinches away at the term. He adds on, in a low voice, “It’s not a bad thing if you ended up liking it more than you thought you would.”

Here’s Dean Winchester’s bright idea. He unbuckles and leans across the bench seat and just, really gently, takes Cas’s head between his fingertips. He brushes a barely-there kiss onto Cas’s forehead. (In retrospect, he doesn’t know why he chose then to do it. Fuck. It just seemed like something Cas needed.)

Cas draws in a shaky breath. His hand comes up and circles around Dean’s wrist, but he doesn’t push him away. He just kind of…holds him there. So Dean brushes another kiss into his hairline, where he smells like sun and sweat, and another one down along his temple. Cas’s eyes close. He’s breathing quickly, shallowly. Dean pulls away and looks at Cas’s face, tilted up to his, and lays a soft kiss, like a blessing, on the plush bow of Cas’s mouth.

Cas jolts away, as if electrocuted. Dean’s barely had a chance to sit up and get his bearings before Cas has scrabbled for the door latch and half-fallen out into the driveway. Dean gets out, too. They look at each other over the top of the car.

“Dude, I—” Dean says. Cas is just staring at him. “I’m sorry. I totally misjudged—”

“You should go,” Cas says.

“I didn’t mean to make this weird—any _more_ weird.”

“Dean.” Cas shakes his head and looks up, towards his house.

“Cas, man.” Dean’s at a loss. “Just talk to me. Please.”

“You should go,” Cas says again, stonily. “I think you need to figure this out for yourself.”

“Figure _what_ out?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Cas bursts out. “You think I’ve been hanging around so much because _I_ need _you_? It’s the other way around, Dean. I’m in your life, and I’ll only ever be in your life, because you need that connection to Sam.”

“Dude, fuck you.”

“You think I _like_ it that way?” Cas’s laugh is an ugly thing. “See, this is why I can’t talk about it with you. First you hated me because of what I represented. And now you only want me around because of it. I’m—I’m nothing but a vessel to you. Just a meatsuit with Sam’s heart stuffed inside.”

“You need to shut your mouth,” Dean says. He can feel his hands forming into fists.

“Or _what_?” Cas says. He angrily swipes at his cheeks—Dean hadn’t even realized he was crying until then. “You can’t take away something I never had in the first place.”

“What’ this, then, huh?” Dean roars, pointing a hand between them. He can still feel the soft, phantom pressure of Cas’s lips against his. “What are you trying to say? That I was _in love_ with my brother, or something?”

“You were obviously very close to him—”

“I can’t fuckin’ listen to this,” Dean says. He gets into the car and slams the door. Cas’s stupid fucking fanny pack falls onto the floor, with a rattle like there are pills inside, so Dean picks it up and gets back out and hurls it across the top of the car towards Cas, who stands, unmoving, as it thuds to the ground by his feet.

“I wasn’t in love with my brother, you moron—”

“I never said you were,” Cas says. His hands drop away from his cheeks; he suddenly seems very tired. “You miss him. And here I am. And I just don’t think you know what you want, Dean.”

“Did it ever occur to you those feelings might be _two separate things_ ,” Dean seethes.

“Is there a way for me to know that?” Cas says, with this quiet desperation that sets Dean’s teeth on edge. “How should I be able to tell? I’m—I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“The right thing,” Dean laughs. “Yeah. Great fucking job you did there, buddy.”

He doesn’t give Cas a chance to reply. He ducks back into the car and screeches out of the driveway. All the way home, all he can see is red.

**

August 9th, 2012

_I really don’t know what to think, Sammy._

_The way I see it, there are two options. The first is that you’re getting my letters, and not reading them. Maybe you see them and immediately throw them in the trash. Who am I kidding. You see them and you immediately throw them in the recycling bin. Getting my letters, reading them, and then still not bothering to reply. What am I supposed to do with that? Tell me what I need to say that’ll make me get a postcard, even one friggin’ word, so that I know you’ve really been on the other end of the line this whole time._

_Then there’s the other option. That the only address I have for you, from three years ago, isn’t where you live anymore. And these letters are sitting in someone’s dusty mailbox, and they’re getting annoyed—all this mail, from a former tenant who left no forwarding address, and eventually they’re gonna take my letters and cross out your name on the envelope and leave them out for the mailman to find—RETURN TO SENDER_ _written across the top. And I have no Plan B for what happens then; no phone numbers or emails or alternate addresses to work with. Maybe that’s worse. Because all these letters are just going to end up in a stack on the kitchen table, to California and back, and I’ll be no closer to finding you._

_Are you getting these letters, Sam? I need to know. Please. I just need to know._

_Dean_

_**_

Of course Dean manages to find a way to piss Jess off, just to round out the perfectly great past few days he’s been having.

It is his fault. He won’t deny that part, at least. He kept himself busy with work and sleep for a few days, managing to keep somewhat of a lid on the whole thing, and then Friday came—Friday, the night when Jess normally has Cas and Dean over for dinner—and he knew the jig was up. Although it was pretty douchey to ignore her three straight calls, but he knew she’d be over soon enough.

Jess knocks, even though Dean knows she has a spare key. He tells her so when he opens the door.

“A spare key?” she says. “Because I thought spare keys were only given to _family members_ , and you’re sure as shit not treating me like one of those.”

Dean just stands there, hands empty, trying to think of something to say. His mind seems too blank to come up with anything smart, for once. Jess crosses her arms.

“You’re a no-show—thanks for telling me, by the way. And Cas called and said he wasn’t coming. Said you probably couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as him right now.”

“Look, you and I aren’t a package deal. If you’re mad Cas didn’t come just because of me—”

“No, Dean!” Jess snaps. “I’m _mad_ because you keep doing this! You cut me out, out of nowhere, and I’m left out in the cold trying to figure out what happened. After everything we’ve been through—after the last eight months of being each other’s backbone, I thought I might deserve a little bit more than this.”

“You’re right,” Dean says. “I’m sorry, you’re right.”

“I know it’s not written down on paper like it was supposed to be, but I was going to be your sister. Practically blood.”

“You _are_ my sister, Jess—”

“Then can you _please_ act like it?” Jess takes a few steps and sinks down onto the couch. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one trying, here. I _need_ you, okay?”

Dean sits down quietly next to her. After a few seconds, she sighs and lays her head on his shoulder. “You were the only person who got me through that,” she says. “You remember. Everyone else was sorry, everyone else brought casseroles, everyone else said it was tragic. But _you—_ I can’t lose you, okay? Sometimes I need someone to remind me he was _real._ You’re the only one who can do that.”

Dean’s been so tired, these past few days. Or maybe he’s just finally realized how tired he’s been all along. It’s a weird kind of exhaustion he can’t quite shake. It doesn’t leave him craving alcohol, or nights of oblivion in Andy’s van. It’s nothing like the terrible sadness, the rage, that was his life right after Sam’s death. Mostly he just feels like he’s missing something—not in the same way he misses Sammy, which is like missing a phantom limb. It’s more like a sad, dull ache. Kind of like the cosmic pebble in his shoe. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to get rid of it. In Jess’s presence, though, it fades away, just a bit. Like matching like. He already knows that he needs her, but maybe he never knew quite how much until now.

“That sounds so selfish,” Jess speaks up suddenly. “I need you around for—for more than that. You know that, right?”

“You’re not being selfish, Jess,” Dean says. “You’re just trying to survive.”

**

It’s been a long time since Dean had to really _think_ while working on a car. That leaves a lot of brainpower to muse over other things as his tightens and adjusts and refills on autopilot.

Here’s the thing. Cas is right, but only partly. He’s right in the fact that Dean needs to really think about what he wants. It’s no understatement to say that Dean spends a lot of time and concentrated effort in _not_ doing that. In this particular scenario, it got too muddled, he didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Maybe it’s time he does.

Cas and Sam, Sam and Cas. He’s been unable to hold both in his mind at once; the other one just slides out of his thoughts, like water running over from an overfilled tub. For a while now he hasn’t let himself think about his attraction to Cas, the man who’s only alive because Sam is dead. Probably because that means really and truly coming to terms with the fact that Sam is dead—sometimes, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that incredibly life-altering detail. Because Dean can’t remember a time where he didn’t have his brother. He spent most of his life cataloguing away what his brother’s snores sounded like in the next bed over, the exact angle Sam would hang his knobby elbow out the Impala’s window during summer vacation road trips.  There’s been a Sammy in his head since there’s been a _Dean_ ; maybe that’s just the way that brothers are. So what’s he supposed to do with all this knowledge now that Sammy’s not around? What kind of fucked-up  take-away is Dean supposed to get from that? 

 Unless, of course, there’s no take-away.  No morality fable about the whole thing. Just this tragic, bizarre series of events that have somehow let Cas—awkward, honest, kind-hearted Cas—into Dean’s life. Dean can’t say for sure how he would have felt about Cas if a thousand different scenarios had played out instead—if they had met before everything happened, if Sam never died, if Cas wasn’t the one who needed his heart. But maybe that’s not the point of it, anyways. The circumstances of it don’t mean that what Dean feels is wrong.

 He remembers what he said to Cas in the juice bar—that Sam had had a lot of heart, and that Cas would get there, too. In retrospect, he wishes he had never said it. Cas had just seemed so defeated then, resigned to living in the margins. But Dean was wrong, see? Cas had plenty of heart, too much of it, for all the people he cared about, and none of those people seemed to be himself. Maybe he should have made that a whole lot clearer before Cas—who’s wide off the mark about everything else—started to think there was only one reason Dean wanted him around in the first place.

“ _Dean_.”

He looks up to find Bobby standing next to him, looking concerned.

“Are you all right?  You weren’t answering me.”

“Yeah,” Dean says quickly. “I’m great.”

“Okay,” Bobby says slowly. “Well. In my leadership training seminar, I was told I need to be more vocal with my praise when someone does their job well. So…good job, Dean.”

“Your leadership training seminar.”

“Yeah,” Bobby says, scowling. “Effective leaders run effective businesses. It’s a proven fact.”

“Right,” Dean says. “Uh, thanks, Bobby. That’s—that’s very nice of you.”

“I’m not saying it to be _nice_ ,” Bobby says. He hitches his belt further up his waist. “It’s a business strategy.” He turns to walk away, but before Dean can duck his head back under the hood, Bobby’s back at his side. “Look,” Bobby says furtively, casting his eye around for any of Dean’s coworkers. “I’m only going to ask you once.”

“Are you about to sell me drugs?” Dean asks loudly.

“Shut your trap,” Bobby growls. “You don’t want to talk about it? Guess what? _I_ don’t want to talk about it. But here goes—are you _sure_ you’re all right?”

“Yeah, Bobby,” Dean says. “I’m—actually, you know what?”

“What?” Bobby asks, looking a little fearful.

“I’m having _relationship problems_ , that’s what’s up with me. So. I’m glad you finally asked, because boy do I have a lot of stuff to get off my chest.” He leans one foot up on the bumper and starts listing them off, even though Bobby and emotional problems seem to have the same kind of relationship that vampires and sharpened stakes do. “So here’s the thing. There’s this guy—Cas. You know him. I let him work on a car with me back here even though I shouldn’t have. So _suppose_ that I’m getting the feeling that Cas has the hots for me—which, supposing I’ve been a proud bisexual since I saw David Bowie in _Labyrinth_ , doesn’t exactly put me off my lunch. Suppose that Cas and I get real close and domestic. I’m talking kale salad here, Bobby. I’m willing to eat kale salad for the guy.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bobby mutters, now glancing wildly around for a way out.

“And then I find out that Cas hasn’t quite felt the romance of the whole situation, seeing as he thinks I’m just using him—did I mention that Cas is the one who got the—?” He mimes putting a pulsing heart into his chest, and zipping it back together. “Right. Where was I. So even though I’m pretty sure Cas has got the hots for me, he’s playing his cards pretty close to his chest, because _he_ thinks that I only see him as a substitute for Sam, and a pretty poor one   at that. So naturally, since I was talking about _feelings_ with him, I told him to fuck off and probably left tire marks down his driveway. And there’s something in there about using him to fulfill a quasi-incestual relationship with Sam, but I won’t get into that right now.”

Dean leans down to flick a stub of grass from the toe of his shoe. “So. What do you think, Bobby?”

Bobby’s staring at him in a way that could be complete revulsion or complete sympathy—Bobby’s range of facial expressions is pretty limited, so he tends to double up on them.

Finally he says, slowly, like he’s feeling it out, “I guess…I’m thinking …there’s somewhere else you should be right now.”

“Whaddaya know,” Dean says in surprise. “That’s the best advice I’ve gotten in ages.”

**

He makes it to Chico in just under two hours. From his car in the driveway to Cas’s front porch—two seconds. He feels like there’s so much to say, not enough time to say it.

When Cas opens the door, his face is wary, grim. He doesn’t invite Dean inside.

“Look, I didn’t come here to fight,” Dean says. “I came here—I came here to tell you. Shit. Can I come inside?”

Cas cocks his head from one side to the other and finally relents. He moves aside and lets Dean step past him into the hallway. It’s dark, so it takes Dean a second for his eyes to adjust, and then he sees Cas nodding him towards a doorway off the hallway, where the kitchen is. There’s a mismatched wooden table, and a vase filled with drooping flowers, and a bowl on the counter filled with fruit. Dean looks around. The spots of color in the room make him feel oddly happy, especially since they’re Cas’s doing. He sees a sun-catcher of a bee over the sink, sending shards of yellow stripes over the faucet, and he just about beams.

 “Sorry,” Dean says lamely;  he seems to be having trouble forming words.

 “How can I help you, Dean?” Cas seems aggravated, restless.

“Right,” Dean says. “Let’s just get it all out in the open here. The situation is fucked up, okay? I’ll be the first to say it. But you’re not just some—some _vessel_ to me. That would mean you’re the same to me as anyone else, Cas, and that’s not how I feel about you at all.”

Cas rubs at his elbow. He already looks exhausted with this conversation, two seconds from kicking Dean to the curb.  “Okay, Dean—”

“Please, just—just listen a minute, okay? I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t be a major asshole whenever Sam’s birthday comes around, or when it’s October in a couple months,              which’ll be a year since he died, or…anything really. Sometimes I’ll just be a prick, and he’s always gonna be the reason why. And someone’s probably gonna say something stupid to me sometime like, it was _meant_ to happen, or how else would I have met you?” Cas looks surprised when Dean gestures at him. “And I’ll probably say something to them about how that’s a piece of fucking bullshit. Because God himself, if he even exists in the first place, couldn’t give me a good reason for why Sam isn’t alive when he should be. But all of that, being pissed off that’s he’s dead, or _hating_ that it’s the reason why we met in the first place— it’s never going to mean that I’m not fucking delighted to have you in my life now.”

Cas stands frozen. His eyes are sheer wonderment. It makes Dean brave enough to close some of that distance between them, to press wordlessly against his side and fold Cas’s hand into his own. It’s almost too easy, how fast Dean collapses against him, in all the ways that matter. Dean shouldn’t get to have that, but somehow he does.

 “Cas, man, forget what you think you _should_ be doing. You don’t have anything to make up for, to anyone, especially not me. You don’t owe the world a goddamned thing. Forget how fucked up this whole situation is. Just—what do _you_ want?”

He’s not sure if he’s making sense. He’s trying to warn Cas—as if Cas wasn’t aware enough of what a trainwreck Dean Winchester is, but maybe now he knows for certain. He’s trying to make sure it’s all out in the open, that there’s nothing left to misunderstand, anymore. That at the end of the day they’re just two people, and one of those people—Dean Winchester—has been thinking about the texture of Cas’s lips ever since they kissed in the car yesterday. And it’ll be so very okay if Cas has been thinking about that, too. But it’ll also even be okay if what Cas wants isn’t what Dean’s been hoping for. At least that would mean that Cas is thinking about what’s best for _himself_ , for a change.

Cas doesn’t answer him. Or, at least, he doesn’t answer him in so many words. But at some point his head tilts up, and sideways, and his lips are sliding over the line of Dean’s jaw, and that’s enough for Dean to know. Cas kisses him, and oh God, it’s _want_. It’s a want that licks up hot flames in Dean’s stomach, that makes his fingers work into Cas’s hair and _pull._ It’s wet and hot, and Cas is already pushing these undone, unrounded syllables from his mouth and into Dean’s, and this is something Dean can do for him. Cas stumbles back a step and then Dean’s pushing him down into a kitchen chair, sucking a hickey against Cas’s bobbing Adam’s apple as he does. There is definitely something Dean can do for him. 

**

Dean can’t say how long they’ve been kissing for. They seem to have found this perfect loophole, this frozen moment, like Dean could spend years learning the taste, the feel, of Cas’s mouth against his, and the world would keep on spinning past them unheeded. It’s quiet in Cas’s house, so the only sounds are the ones they’re making—the chair creaking beneath Cas, the sounds of their lips catching, breathing loud and uneven. At some point—Dean can’t say how long ago for this, either—Dean had nudged Cas’s legs apart, holding the back of Cas’s chair for leverage as he slowly starts rolling his hips against Cas’s. Cas goes just about wild for that, giving these breathy groans every time Dean’s hips slot against him just right.

“Cas,” Dean says, drawing away far enough that he can look at him. “How long has it—”

“Long.” Cas’s hair is a wreck, his face flushed. He really almost looks like he’s already been fucked, if it weren’t for the tight, needy way he’s holding onto Dean’s shirt, dragging him closer. “Dean, please.”

“I’ve got you,” Dean says. He stumbles upright, dragging Cas with him, and somehow, between drugging kisses, they manage to get to the kitchen wall—some more kissing, pressed against it—and then out the doorway, and then into Cas’s living room. It has carpet. At this present moment in Dean’s life, that’s all he really needs.

Cas, long and lean, pressed back against the floor. Dean doesn’t even bother to get their clothes all the way off. Just leans over Cas, pulls his sweatpants and boxers down to his knees, and grabs hold of his cock. Cas’s hips come right off the floor.

“Oh, God—” Cas is whispering these bitten-off pleas, _Dean_ , _yes again, ohpleaseohplease,_ and if Dean rests his forehead against Cas’s temple and tilts his head just right he can see down Cas’s body, past his crumpled shirt, to where his fat, pinkened cockhead is thrusting through Dean’s fist.

“Look so pretty like this,” Dean says. “You know that?”

Cas doesn’t appear to care. Not when Dean’s twisting his wrist that certain way, not when Dean’s knuckles are dragging up along the vein like that. He struggles up onto his elbows, kissing Dean frantically, reaching to undo Dean’s belt. He draws Dean out through his fly and starts stroking him with a hot, moist palm.

Dean could almost come like that, Cas jerking him until he’s spilling over Cas’s stomach and chest. It would be uncoordinated and sloppy and perfect, but Dean wants something more. He kisses Cas back onto the floor again and stands up to fish out his wallet.

“Dean, I need—” Cas’s hand closes around his ankle, like he’s gonna drag Dean to the floor if he goes one step further. Like, after going so long without someone else’s touch, he can’t go for more than a second without it now.

Packet of lube. Condom—he knows Cas really shouldn’t have sex without it. (Dean’s done his own research, at this point.)  He drops down over Cas, straddling him, and pushes his jeans down over the curve of his ass, past his knees. He’d have to stand up to kick them all the way off so he leaves them as is. Cas’s hands travels up over his biceps, his shoulders. He drags him down for another kiss.

One hand clenched into the carpeting by Cas’s head, for balance. The other worked behind him at a weird angle, working two lube-wet fingers into himself in quick succession. God, the stretch feels good. Dean hasn’t done this in a long time, either. He’s not so much kissing Cas at this point than fumbling his lips over the shape of his chin, feeling the catch of Cas’s stubble against his own. Dean gasps when Cas’s hot hand returns to his cock again, pulling on him steadily, root to tip. He can feel the head of his dick dragging over Cas’s belly, catching alongside Cas’s cock. He opens his eyes and Cas is there, inches away, staring up at him trusting and desperate, on the edge of unraveling. Dean presses kisses into his hair— _patience, patience_ —and shoves back onto his fingers and forward into Cas’s slick fist a few more times.

Pushes Cas’s hand away. Rises up on his knees over Cas, wraps a hand around him, smoothes the condom down. Pumps his cock a few extra times with his slick fingers, just to prime him up, and slowly guides Cas back, between his cheeks. There. Cas is thick, so that’s nice, the way Dean’s body has to open-stretch for him. Oh, that’s nice. Dean rises up a little more and then settles down on Cas’s cock again, bringing him all the way in this time. Cas’s hands, curled into Dean’s t-shirt, drag up and down over Dean’s ribs.

“Good?”

“So fucking good,” Dean murmurs. He rolls his hips experimentally and they both make these filthy sounds in unison. Dean starts up a slow, unhurried rhythm. Cas is gasping and groaning, twitching beneath him, breathless. That’s nice, too. Dean starts shoving back on him faster, and—“Jesus, there it is, yeah.” Then he’s fucking himself frantic, trying to get Cas’s cock in that perfect slide against that place that lights him up. He leans forward—maybe to brace himself against Cas’s chest—but then he thinks about the breastbone, broken and knit back together, the fragility there, so he leans back and holds himself steady on Cas’s kneecaps, instead.

“Cas, right there, right there—” Cas grips Dean’s hips and drives up into him wildly, pounding into him, and the sound of it is obscene and perfect. Dean arches his back and feels his whole body shaking with the thrusts. He hears something _rip_ —there’s still too much clothes—he doesn’t care.  He brings a hand around and grabs his cock, which, with every thrust, has been smacking against his stomach where his shirt has ridden up, and comes like a goddamn fountain at the first slick rub of his fingers.

He’s still shuddering with the force of it when Cas pushes up and stills, grinding Dean tight down against him until there’s not a space between them. Dean gets to watch Cas sob through what seems to be a pretty epic orgasm. A few more lazy pulses into Dean and then Cas sags back onto the floor, bringing Dean down with him.

Dean collapses forward against him, probably smearing come all across their shirts, but he’s not in the kind of mood to mind. He sucks a languid hickey into the side of Cas’s neck, smiling when Cas groans and shifts. Finally he sits up and lets Cas slide out, and takes stock.

His knees are definitely gonna be feeling this tomorrow. Not to mention they’re already pretty red and raw looking—rug burn from the carpet. He pulls up his jeans, still puddled around his shins, although he doesn’t bother with his belt. From the way Cas sits up, frowns, and rubs a hand ruefully over the small of his back, Dean’s guessing Cas got some ass-burn, too.

“What’s so funny?” Cas asks, since Dean’s giggling to himself. He’s watching Dean with soft, fond eyes. Dean’s laughter dies away. God, he’s come to love that face—and maybe it’s too soon, or too much, or not what people think he should be doing. But he can’t help it, either. He doesn’t _want_ to help it anymore.

“Nothing,” he says. He reaches out a hand and pulls Cas up from the floor. “We were pretty desperate for it, huh? No bed. Barely got my clothes off.”

“Well,” Cas says. He can’t seem to follow that thought through right away, he’s still looking a little too dazed. That makes Dean feel pretty smug. “I was thinking…maybe now we could go to my room. There’s a bed. And less clothing.”

Trust them to get the order backwards; Dean hasn’t even had a chance to just sleep next to the guy yet. But, looking down at Cas with his sweatpants still around his knees, his spectacular sex hair, he can’t really find it in himself to care.

“I like the sound of that.”

So Cas leads Dean down the hallway, to a small bedroom with the blinds closed against the setting sun. Dean makes quick work of pulling his sweaty t-shirt off over his head, followed by his jeans. When he turns around, Cas’s back is to him. Although he’s stepped out of his sweatpants, now only wearing his boxers, he’s pulling on a different shirt, a new shirt, and Dean’s not really sure why until Cas turns to look at him a bit self-consciously.

Right. The scar. Dean pulls Cas onto the bed with him and shamelessly co-opts himself into being the little spoon, drawing Cas’s arm tight around his waist. Their legs tangle together. He can feel Cas relaxing into him.

“In the morning,” Cas says, slowly, happily, the curve of his smile sliding across the back of Dean’s neck, “we can make breakfast.”

**

In the morning, they make breakfast.

Cas is already showered and fresh as a summer’s breeze by the time Dean manages to pull himself from bed. He can’t help it. His body feels kind of achy, but also in a pleasant way, the kind that makes you want to stay in bed all day drowsing. Finally he stumbles into the shower and, after managing to knock a third of Cas’s soap and shampoo products onto the floor, stumbles back out again. Cas lets him borrow a clean t-shirt, and then likes the sight of Dean in it so much that they spend a few minutes giving each other swollen lips and mussed hair.

Cas seems to think he’s the big man of the house after last night—Dean can’t decide if it was the sex or being the big spoon that seems to have given Cas that idea—so he insists on driving them to the farmer’s market in town. They’re barely in the car before Cas has their fingers knotted together, resting against his thigh. Dean likes it more than he should, too. He can feel Cas’s thigh shift and relax every time he presses the gas pedal, and dammit, it _does things_ for him.

At the farmer’s market, he and Cas rove around between the tables. Slowly a collection of foodstuffs gets accumulated. More than they’ll be using in one breakfast, that’s for sure. But it’s nice, watching Cas interact with the vendors, inspecting each fruit and vegetable with care, sniffing the fresh loaves of baked bread. He looks happy, and what’s more, his head will swivel around to find Dean—as he talks to an aging hippie about her cold-pressed juice, as he looks mournfully at a collection of jarred honey (his dietician recommends against  it)—and it just comes across so clear. How much Dean is a part of Cas’s happiness.

And God, does Dean want this. He’s been dancing around the edges long enough, looking too long and touching too much, all within some set of limitations to ultimately keep a lid on the idea of any potential. He meant what he told Cas yesterday. He’s going to let Cas do this thing for him—he’s going to let Cas make him so fucking happy.

Dean sidles up next to him as Cas is looking over a table of herbs and takes his hand—his free one, not weighed down with Cas’s finds—and slides it into the back pocket of Cas’s jeans.

“You about ready, babe?”

Cas’s eyes get really wide, exchanging a look with the woman running the stall like he wants to confirm that _she_ heard that, too.

“Uh, yeah, just about,” Cas says. His fingers rasp over his stubble as he scratches his cheek, looking a little flushed, and like he’s trying to hide it.

Dean squeezes a handful of Cas’s ass through the pocket. Cas visibly jumps. “I was thinking we could go home, and make some hot, steamy—” He smiles at the woman in the booth. “— _Breakfast_.”

Cas never does buy any herbs. Instead, he drags Dean back to the Continental and shoves Dean into the passenger seat and clambers into his lap—it _is_ nice that the seats are so big, Dean allows—and kisses him with a wild kind of fever that is so fucking perfect—Cas, taking what he wants, having what he wants, giving himself over to the pleasure he’s been denying himself. Dean cradles Cas’s jaw in the cup of his palms and gives it back to him, for all that he’s worth. They go on like that until a concerned parent knocks on the window and demands they take it elsewhere.

They do take it elsewhere—back to Greydove Lane. And then they make breakfast, or something to that effect. Cas keeps wanting to consult with his organic living cookbook, while Dean would rather just make it up as they go along. The end result is something in the middle of those two ideologies.

Breakfast with Cas, with their bare feet prodding each other under the table, the breeze blowing the smell of summer through the window, knocking the blinds softly against the window frame. Dean thinks, with a startling kind of clarity, that these are the kinds of things a person can live for.

**

They text each other regularly while they’re at work now. On Thursday, Dean sees two new messages while he’s in the bathroom.

_Why is six afraid of seven? Everyone else in the office seemed to know._

Followed by, _Do you feel fulfilled by your job?_

Dean’s thumbs hover over the screen. After a second he writes back, _Bc 789. My job doesnt save the world or anything, but I like it and Im good at it_

He’s surprised that Cas replies as fast he does. _I know every job can’t make a difference for the greater good. I’ve always thought a job should be personally rewarding in some way though, at least. Although I know not many people are able to achieve that—a job’s a job._

_789??_

Dean huffs a laugh. _Bc he ate it_

And also, _Are you not happy being back at work? Bc its ok to not like it, even if its decent money. We can talk about it when youre here tomorrow_

Dean should really be getting back to work himself, so he starts to tuck his phone back into the breast pocket of his coveralls, but then it starts vibrating like crazy.

_Who ate what?_

_Dean, I’m very confused. This has nothing whatsoever to do with prime numbers?_

_It is very steady and reliable and I am good at it. But I feel like my whole life happens around the edges of 9-5 every day._

_Is that normal? Maybe this is only a near-death experience thing. Maybe you don’t get it._

_Not to invalidate your own experiences, of course._

There’s a loud thumping on the bathroom door.  Tracy shouts, “Are you taking the biggest shit of your life, or what?”

Another voice chimes in. “—Probably clogged the toilet, and he’s embarrassed now. We should leave him alone until he’s ready to come out.” Garth. Thinking he’s actually sticking up for Dean. He rolls his eyes.

_Might be normal, doesnt mean you should settle though_

_Have to get back to work_

And then, before he can second-guess himself— _xo_

He’s blushing when he comes out of the bathroom.

“Look how red his face is!” Tracy says. “He _so_ stopped up the toilet.”

**

It’s a bit of a first. Cas has been to Berkeley—Dean has to think about it—ten, eleven times now. But Dean’s never hosted any of the dinners at his own house.

He’s not really quite sure why that is. Maybe he still needed a bit of a buffer, a defensive distance, when Cas first started to become more of a regular fixture. But not now. In fact, he’s pretty near pacing by the front door, waiting for Cas and Jess to arrive.

Cas comes first, a little after eight. He’s got a squash tucked under his arm—“I thought we could find a way to incorporate it, Dean”—like a total fucking nerd. Dean laughs and drops a kiss onto his lips.

“I think Jess is running a little late.”

“I don’t mind,” Cas says. He looks around the front hallway of Dean’s house with interest. “Are you going to give me a tour?”

Dean looks at him incredulously. “Dude, we don’t have time for _that_.”

“For a tour?” Cas cocks his head in confusion.

“Oh. I thought you wanted to make it up to the bedroom,” Dean says. “Way to abuse a classic pick-up line.”

“Oh,” Cas says. He looks up the stairs and back to Dean again.

“You’re holding a squash right now, you dweeb,” Dean says, with no small amount of affection. “Not exactly the height of seduction.”

He shows Cas around the ground floor instead. Cas seems to like Dean’s extensive record collection, which is always a plus. They cycle back through the kitchen, where the squash is finally relinquished, and then out into the backyard so Cas can check out the deck and the fire pit in the evening light.

They’re still back there when Dean hears the front door open and close.

“I think Jess is here,” he tells Cas. He’s a little bit nervous. He hasn’t told Jess about him and Cas.  Not because he’s trying to hide it, or anything—he’s pretty sure she’ll be able to tell what’s going on between them relatively quickly; he doubts they’re going to be able to be subtle about it for long. But there’s a certain, other lack of subtlety in how your former fiancée’s heart now resides in the chest of the man your all-but-blood-brother is currently making heart eyes at.

Dean turns to wave to Jess, or call her over, and freezes in mid-motion.

Jess comes stumbling out through the back door, sobbing. Her hair is clinging wetly to her cheeks, mascara smeared beneath her eyes. Dean honestly just doesn’t know what to do. He hasn’t seen Jess like this since—

Cas takes her by the elbow, steering her down into one of the deck chairs. “Jess, what is it?” he says. He has one arm around her shoulder, protective yet gentle, all while Dean can only stare. “What happened?”

“A—all the pictures,” Jess says. “All of the pic-pictures of Sam on the laptop. Someone _stole_ it. It’s _gone_.”

**

August 12th, 2012

_Here’s my favorite memory._

_Dad was gone, whothefuck knows where. Mom was long gone by then, too. And I stole fireworks out of the equipment shed at high school, because I knew the district fireworks display was going to be launching from the baseball fields later. I knew they’d be keeping them nearby._

_All of our friends were probably sitting in the high school football stadium, waiting for the show, and you and I drove out to the middle of bumfuck nowhere so we could have our own celebration instead._

_Do you remember how you almost burned your hand on the sparkler—you let it burn down too far, trying to practice writing your name in the air. It would only last a second, each time. But if you looked hard enough and closed your eyes, you said there was still something of it—an imprint?—glowing on the inside of your eyelids._

_Do you remember how we lit them all at once, every last one of them? All those reds and greens and golds. Our skin changed color with it. We were close enough that when each one popped off, I could feel the_ boom _rattle my whole chest. You got all dizzy from tilting your head back, trying to see them all._

_It was so fucking pretty. Probably because for once in our lives, something that nice was something just for us._

_**_

Jess tells them that she had planned on stopping at her house after work so she could change before coming over. She tells them that she got home and noticed shards of glass on the porch, and only then did she see that the front pane of the door had been knocked out.

She says she doesn’t know why she wasn’t scared, why she didn’t stop then and call the police. But she looked and saw how the burglar could have reached through the door and unlatched the door from the inside. And then she followed the burglar’s footsteps and walked around the house, finding drawers open and pawed through, her jewelry box emptied out. She says she doesn’t care about the other stuff—the only jewelry that matters is her engagement ring, which she never takes off. But she felt like something wasn’t right, that she’d had too lucky of a near miss, and only after walking around the house another time did she realize that her laptop wasn’t where she’d left it, charging on  the coffee table.

It was really Sam’s laptop. He was the one obsessed with that kind of stuff. He’d make specified photo albums on it for each separate trip he and Jess took together, further segmented into categories like _Yosemite—Jess and Me, Day 2_ or _Napa Valley—J, D, and Me, First Tasting._ Everything picture-worthy, every memory and moment, posed and candid, in the car and at the rest stops and on top of mountains and everything in between.  Almost every photograph Jess had of the two of them, from the beginning of their relationship until the end. Snatched away in seconds.

The reality of what happened really starts to dawn on Dean. He feels sick. He drops down onto the deck chair next to Jess, who’s still crying.

“Can we—can we call the police or something?” Dean says. “Maybe they can, I don’t know, dust for prints—”

Jess wipes her nose on her sleeve. “We can,” she says dully. “But I don’t see what’s going to be accomplished by it. We live in a college town with thousands of people. The police aren’t going to devote a lot of resources to tracking down one stolen laptop.”

“Yeah. Of course,” Dean says. He feels a weird kind of panic that has nothing to do, immediately, with Jess’s laptop. He’s wondering where his own photos of Sam are, if they’re going to be enough to get him through a lifetime without him, because there aren’t any back-ups, anymore. He’s wondering where Jess's pictures are now. He’s wondering what kind of sick sonofabitch steals someone’s memories like that, not even caring that there’s nothing to replace them with.

“Maybe it’ll turn up around here,” Dean says. “Like at a pawn shop, or a used store…”

“I’ve heard of them turning up really far away,” Cas says. “There was a news article about someone’s laptop ending up in Iran.”

“ _Iran_?” Jess says. Dean’s glare makes Cas flinch, which is just another complication—he already knows Cas starts feeling sensitive and guilty whenever the subject has to do with Sam’s death. He knows Cas is just trying to be helpful. But seriously. _Iran._

“Wait,” Dean says. “Wait a minute. That might be it. Cas, you’re a fuckin’ genius.”

No one is more shocked by that revelation than Cas himself. “I—I am?”

Dean runs inside for his laptop, quickly unplugging and bringing it back out to the deck. “Maybe we _can_ find out where it is,” he says.  “There’s, like, tracking software that lets you locate where it is, right? You’ve got to bet Sam would have been up-to-date about that kind of stuff.”

“Okay…” Jess says. She sounds like she isn’t letting herself hope, at least not yet.

“And we know someone who can follow up on that kind of information,” Dean says. He clicks over the Skype bubble on his screen.

“Who?”

“Charlie,” Jess says slowly. “I think I even remember Sam having her do something on his laptop when he was having virus problems.  She had…remote access, or something like that. Do you think she could do that again?”

“We can see,” Dean says. Cas and Jess come to stand over his shoulders as he logs in and clicks Charlie’s name. There’s a second or two of lag, which means Dean can hear Charlie before he can see her.

“About _fucking_ time, Dean, I’ve only been trying—uh, hey everyone. Is this an intervention?”

Charlie’s face finally appears on the screen.

“No intervention,” Dean says. “And I really, really need your help right now.”

Charlie’s face is serious. “What’s going on?”

“Hey, Charlie,” Jess says, leaning forward. “Someone stole Sam’s laptop out of my house today. If there’s _any_ way you could find where it is, or, I don’t know—”

“Way ahead of you,” Charlie says. On the screen, her fingers are flying over the keyboard, squinting at something on her screen that only she can see. “Broke into your house? _Assholes_. You’re okay, right, Jess?”

“I’m okay,” Jess agrees. “I wasn’t there.” Her hand is digging into Dean’s shoulder as she tensely watches Charlie.

“And who’s tall, dark, and Constantine over there?” Charlie asks, her eyes flicking up to the camera.

Cas squints uncertainly. “I’m Cas.”

“Good to know,” Charlie says. “I’m Char— _oh!_ You’re _the_ Cas.”

“Yes,” Cas says. “Uh, I think so.”

“Nice to meet you,” Charlie says. “So, when Sam was having computer problems, I was able to get remote desktop access so if it ever happened again, I could work on it from wherever I was. If I track the IP, it’ll give me something called a remote address—which isn’t super helpful, because it only narrows it down a certain area, but I am a genius, so—” She smiles and taps a few more keys with flourish. “Whoa. Dude’s got a lead foot. It’s in Lovelock.”

Dean shakes his head. “I don’t even know where that is.”

“Try Nevada,” Charlie says. “It’s over four hours away from Berkeley. He really wanted to get across state lines, I guess. I can text you the address.”

“Please,” Dean says. “And—”

“I’m already reading your mind. As long as they don’t disable the GPS hardware, I’ll be able to keep an eye on it, make sure it doesn’t move somewhere else.”

“Charlie—”

“Just call me the queen,” she says. “Love you guys. Let’s fight crime together again, sometime.”

The call ends, and almost simultaneously Dean’s phone vibrates with a text from Charlie. The address she promised.

“Lovelock,” Jess repeats. “So this guy cased my house and then drove all the way to Nevada.”

“Yeah, but now we have his address,” Dean says, flashing the text at her.

“How’s that going to help us? The police aren’t going to search a house in a completely different state just because I call them and say my laptop ended up there.”

Dean’s stomach drops. Maybe he didn’t think this all the way through. She’s right—something like this, it’s small fry in the criminal sense. And Charlie’s text is now just a series of numbers and letters, with no one to give it to. “Shit.”

Jess slumps down into her deck chair and sighs. The excitement of a few minutes ago slowly drains away. The sun has set, the laptop is still out of reach, and it might as well be in Iran, for all the good Charlie’s tracking skills were. Cas, standing there with his hands empty, clenching, at his sides, looks between the both of them and suddenly excuses himself, walking inside.

Probably feels bad that he can’t do anything to help, Dean thinks dully. Probably thinks this is a family moment that he’d rather _not_ be a part of. Dean doesn’t know how long Cas is gone for. But then the sliding door opens and closes, and Cas steps out, tucking his phone into his pocket.

“I quit my job,” he says. “So I’m ready to go get it whenever you guys are.”

Jess and Dean both goggle at him.

“You what?”

“Well,” Cas says. “Really I was just calling my boss to say I might not be at work on Monday. I’m really not sure how long retrieving a laptop might take.” He sounds faintly apologetic about that. “But he said unless I had a valid medical reason or a funeral to go to, that there was no reason why I shouldn’t be at my desk on Monday morning. So I told him to just never expect me back ever again.”

Jess’s mouth drop open.

“You quit your job,” Dean says wonderingly.

“Yes,” Cas says, now looking uneasily between them. “It was really just a formality. I don’t think you two need to follow in my example.”

“You think we should just drive to Lovelock ourselves?” Dean says. “How, exactly, do you see that playing out?”

“Well, we’ll go to the address, and we’ll tell them we know they have Sam’s laptop,” Cas says. “And then we’ll tell them to…give it back.” He looks at them for some kind of reassurance in his plan.

“The element of surprise,” Jess says suddenly. “The three of us showing up on his porch. I bet he’s not prepared for something like that.”

Dean looks between them. He stands up. “Okay, all right,” he says. “Why the hell not. If it’s the only shot we have, we should take it, shouldn’t we?”

Cas looks relieved. “If it’s important,” he agrees. “We should try everything we can.”

There’s this slow, dawning, child-like kind of glee bubbling between them. They’re going to do this. This stupid, beautiful, bizarre long-shot of a plan. Because why the fuck not?

“We’re going to get it back,” Jess says.  “We’re going to get him back.”

**

 


	4. Part IV

**Part IV**

August 17th, 2012

_Maybe I’ll just drive._

_Fuck this place, man. Fuck this house. I wouldn’t even necessarily come to California—don’t worry, I finally got the hint, loud and clear. I just know I can’t stay here much longer._

_Gas seemed so expensive in high school—at least, it hit the wallet in a bad way on a part-time job—so our road trips never got us out of Kansas. But that was still a lot of road to cover. You used to bitch so much about my music selection, but I know you secretly liked it. You’d be mouthing along even if you didn’t want to. Finding some of those back-roads diners with perfect homemade pie. Sleeping in Baby on the side of the road at night. Do you remember how mad I used to get with you, taking off your socks and putting your nasty feet up on the dashboard? And you’d wonder why you could never find a matching pair, probably because they’re all still stuffed beneath the passenger seat somewhere. Do you remember driving down that dirt road in Oakley, and there were those sunflowers growing so tall and wild, hanging over the road, and they were hitting the sides of the car as we went, and the petals were blowing in  through the windows, landing in our hair?_

_I did look at the atlas in Baby’s glove box, though. It’s probably been there since the late seventies, all wrinkled and with the edges of the paper curling up. It’s I-80 West, almost all the way through. Through the Rocky Mountains, which must be something else, although I bet Baby can make it. Passing through Salt Lake City, through Nevada, which I think is all desert anyhow, and then California is just on the other side. It’s practically a straight shot. One hell of a road trip, huh?_

_**_

They leave first thing the next morning, when the sun is still just an idea of light coming in from the east.

Dean driving, with a cup of steaming coffee cradled in one hand, and Jess in the passenger seat, looking at something on her phone. When Dean looks in the rearview mirror, he sees Cas with his head leaned against the window, hands folded in his lap. His backpack is on the seat beside him—Dean’s glad for that, that Cas assumed last night that he’d be spending the night after dinner, and that was even before they heard about the stolen laptop. Cas says he has enough pills in there to last him through seven days, which is a kind of cautious over-planning, particular to Cas, that Dean absolutely appreciates.

It’s quiet, that first hour or so. Dean fiddles with the radio, adjusts it to a low hum. It doesn’t feel very adventurous, at least not yet. It feels more like he’s driving to drop his kids off at school. But slowly it changes from feeling like that, too. The sun comes out of cloud cover. More cars start merging onto the highway around them. And Jess starts talking about the pictures on the laptop, some moments Dean remembers, some that he doesn’t, while Cas leans his head forward over the bench seat to listen.

“We blew an entire paycheck on this beach house down the coast. It was, like, the size of a bathroom, and had sand everywhere you could imagine. But the beach was right outside the backdoor. There were pictures of me learning to surf— _trying_ to learn to surf. I think some of us fishing from the pier. Not that they turned out very well, but there were pictures of us going out at night with buckets and a flashlight, trying to catch crabs.”

Past Sacramento. Jess seems to find some steady reassurance out of recounting those long-gone moments.

“Snowboarding in Oregon—I forgot about that. Dean, that was the winter right after you moved here. Pictures of the two of you, racing each other down one of the bunny slopes. Pictures of you guys shoving snowballs down the collars of each others’ coats. There was a fondue restaurant in the mountain, and Sam took the most unflattering pictures of us stuffing our faces full.”

“I think you showed me those,” Cas murmurs.

“Pictures from graduation,” Jess remembers. “Pictures of us outside the house when we first moved in, looking all sweaty and gross, boxes everywhere. Pictures of my first day at the hospital, and Sam with his briefcase for _his_ first day, and couples’ Halloween costumes, dyeing our own eggs for Easter. Oh, no, Dean, pictures of when we got engaged—”

“I’ve got those saved on my phone,” Dean says. “He sent them all to me. Don’t worry, those are safe.”

Jess relaxes back into the seat. The local radio station is softly fuzzing, edging out of range. Then her voice starts up again, soft but steady and continuous, like the sound of the tires on the road beneath them. She catalogues as many of the pictures as she can remember. Until Dean can imagine each of them in his mind, perfectly—all those Sams, posing and hugging and sleeping and laughing, caught in his mind’s eye just as they were caught in the flash of a camera.

**

Lovelock, Nevada. They’ve nearly reached it—started seeing signs for it—when Dean’s phone goes off. It’s Charlie.

“Hey,” she says. “So, kind of bad news, kind of good news. Jess’s laptop isn’t showing up in Lovelock, anymore.”

“Then where is it?” Dean demands.

“Well…that’s the thing. It’s offline, so I can’t track it.”

“Was that supposed to be the good news?”

“Look,” Charlie says. “I’m just saying, they might have taken it home and made sure to switch it off. That doesn’t mean it’s not still there, right? Just that they finally stopped being dumb, stupid criminals after almost a full twenty-four hour period. You can almost give them a little bit of credit.”

“Right,” Dean says. He didn’t mean to shoot the messenger, so he adds, “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Here to help,” Charlie says. “I’ll let you know if it ever comes back on.”

There’s a tense, waiting silence as Dean shoves the phone back into his pocket. “So,” he says. “Charlie said whoever took it finally disabled the tracker hoosiewhatsit. So there’s no way to know for sure anymore where it is.”

Jess bites her lip. “Well, we still know the last known location of where it was, right?” she says. “So…we just have to make sure to figure out where it went, if it’s not there anymore.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Right. It’s really not that big of a setback.”

Lovelock is a relatively small town. Surrounded by miles of flat, drab fields, the kind of place in the middle of nowhere where truckers might stop over during the long last leg of their journey. The town seems like it’s from another time, maybe the eighties, not quite caught up with the rest of the world, or at least not the part Dean’s been living in the last few years. They all stare out at it with varying degrees of interest as they’re brought to a stop near the middle of town, waiting for a train to finish rumbling past.

The address Charlie sent Dean leads them to a perfectly normal-looking house on the outskirts of town. There are fields of crops surrounding it, in some places waist-high. There’s also a car out in the driveway, which makes Dean think someone’s home. Dean parks and stares up at it for a few seconds.

“Okay, well then,” Dean says. “Better now than never, right?”

Jess nods. Her mouth is a grim line. “Element of surprise,” she says.

Three distinct slams of their car doors. Then they’re trooping up the front lawn, up the stairs, and they all look at each other in silent confusion until Dean steps up and pounds loudly on the door. After a long pause, the curtains in the window twitch, and then the door opens. There’s a diminutive-looking guy with dark hair, maybe in his early twenties, with glasses and a scowl.

“Whatever you’re peddling, I’m not buying.”

“Yeah, we already know you’re not _buying_ ,” Dean says, and shoulders past him, into the house.

“Hey!” The guy’s protests go ignored as Jess and Cas come in behind him.

“Anyone else home here?” Dean says, peering around the corners. “Or is it just little ole you?”

“Just me,” the guy says. He grabs his phone out of his pocket. “And, in a second, the police.”

Cas grabs the phone out of his hands. “There’s no reason to involve the police, because we’ll be leaving very shortly. I have one question for you—where is the laptop?”

The guy stares around at their unsmiling faces, eyes wide, and then gives an unconvincing laugh. “Lap—laptop? What laptop?”

“I don’t know what you find so funny, but you broke into my home yesterday and stole something very invaluable,” Jess says. “Just give it to us, okay? That’s all we want.”

“Look, _I_ didn’t do anything—”

“Bullshit,” Dean says, looming over him.

“I didn’t, I swear, I didn’t!” he says. He rubs his hand across his hair, aggravated. “Look, if you want to talk about this like…like regular people, instead of barging in here, all Navy Seal Team Six, we can go sit in the living room, okay?”

Dean feels like he’s seen enough spy movies that he shouldn’t be letting the other guy be making all the reasonable suggestions. But it’s not like he’s really in a position to waterboard the guy over the location of the missing laptop, either, so he just gives the guy a menacing look and tromps into the living room. They settle silently onto the couch, everyone except for Dean, who remains standing—again, with the ingrained spy movies—in case the perp decides to make a run for it.

“I’m Cyrus, by the way,” the kid says.

“Yeah, and I’m the brother of the guy’s laptop you stole,” Dean says. “Can we cut to the chase?”

Cyrus gives them an awkward smile. “Right. Look, I’m not the guy you’re looking for. It’s my cousin Ricky. It’s how he makes money on the side.”

Cas has a deep furrow between his eyebrows. “Explain.”

“He—he lives in Nevada, right? But his job takes him to California at least once a month. So while he’s there he cases up a few places near where he’s making deliveries, steals what valuables he can easily carry, and he’s out of state before the homeowner is even off work at five. I’m not saying it’s _okay_. I just know all about it because he’s, you know, bragging about what he scores every time I see him.”

“How does he choose what houses to steal from?” That’s Jess.

“I don’t know,” Cyrus says. “I’m sure there’s any number of ways. No neighbors outside. No visible security system, no dog, no car in the driveway. Normally he looks for a door with a window over the handle, so he can smash in the glass and turn the knob from the inside.”

“And you know all of that because—”

“Like I said, because he brags about it,” Cyrus says. “Look, shit, man, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. Turn him in? I’ve thought about it. But he’s never brought any trouble my way.”

“Hold up,” Dean says. “If Ricky’s the one who’s been stealing stuff, how come we were able to track the laptop to _this_ address?”

Three pairs of eyes swivel to look at Cyrus, who blanches. “It’s because he stays with me on the way back!” Cyrus says. “Honest to God. He came yesterday, spent the night, and took off this morning. Seriously—search my place, if you don’t believe me. The laptop isn’t here because Ricky took it with him.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Dean shoots back, and strides out of the room.

It’s not like this Cyrus would have known or thought that anyone would come here looking for their stolen property. Even so, Dean pokes around the place pretty thoroughly. He checks the desk drawers in the office and the cabinets in the kitchen. Upstairs, he opens the closets and studies the shelves. There is a laptop in Cyrus’s room—which is tastefully decorated with Playboy centerfolds—but it’s not Sam’s. Not to mention that Jess’s jewelry was stolen, too, and he definitely doesn’t see that anywhere, either. If there’s supposed to some supply of valuables snatched from Jess’s and others’ houses, it doesn’t seem to be here.

Dean walks back into the living room.

“—And that’s when I realized that the earth is all we _have_ , you know?  So if you _don’t_ utilize crop rotation—”

“Aw, come on guys, seriously?”

“No, Dean, this is very interesting,” Cas says, who’s watching Cyrus talk intently.

“We have an address,” Jess says triumphantly. “His cousin Ricky lives in West Wendover, which is east along the highway. If we leave soon, we can still get there before dark.”

Dean turns to look at Cyrus. “One last thing. Give me your car keys.” Cyrus looks between Dean’s outstretched hand and his serious face and finally complies, fishing into his pocket and dropping his keyring into Dean’s palm. They troop out together and watch as Dean peers in through the windows of Cyrus’s silver beater of a Taurus. Dean pops the trunk and sees there’s nothing back there but a pair of jumper cables.

“See? Told you. I really don’t have your laptop,” Cyrus says. “And I told you where to find it, too. Can I please have my phone back, now?”

Cas takes Cyrus’s phone out of his pocket and holds it out for him to take, but Dean intercepts it at the last second.

“Do you have Ricky’s number memorized?” he asks.

“Of course not!” Cyrus says. “That’s what phones are for.”

“Good,” Dean says, and winds up like a pitcher before throwing it, overhand, as hard as he can into the field of wheat that borders Cyrus’s house. It sails about twenty yards with a high, beautiful arch, before disappearing into the crop.

“What the fuck was that for, man?”

Cas takes it like it was a literal question. “That’s so you can’t call your cousin and warn him,” he tells Cyrus. “Good luck with all your farming.”

Cyrus’s still staring into the field, dumbfounded, when Dean, Cas, and Jess cross the street and climb back into the Impala.

“To West Wendover, yeah?” Dean says, turning the key in the ignition.

“To West Wendover,” Jess agrees.

**

To West Wendover, so named because it’s the western side of the town of Wendover, the side that falls, just barely, in the state of Nevada. Basically, they’re driving to the Utah border.

The land levels out, interspersed with scrubby wildlife, and mountains loom in the distance. The sky, scudded by clouds, seems to stretch endlessly in all directions. They go for miles without seeing a single house, any sign of human habitat at all, just the flat black line of the road cutting a line through that wild, lonely land.

They stop for lunch in the afternoon. It takes some doing, but they nix two fast food joints before finding a local restaurant that thankfully has some healthy options on the menu, which has never been a priority for Dean any other time he’s had to pull over to get something in his stomach, but admittedly is a priority now. Dean is privately happy to be eating a juicy, heart-unhealthy burger for the first time in what feels like forever. Cas sends a dejected, nostalgic look his way, which seems to be aimed more at the burger than Dean himself.

“Black bean burgers,” Dean says, wiping some grease off his chin. “We’ll have to make them when we get back.”  Cas smiles softly at him.

Jess groans and sits back in her seat, drumming her hands over her stomach. “Ugh. Don’t talk about any more food to me, right now. I’m stuffed.”

Dean makes a grab for the sticky ketchup bottle, which is just past her. They’re sitting by the window, which has this beautiful view of the mountains to the east of them, purple-blue against the sky, sprawled in an elaborate, origami-like series of folds. Cas keeps on getting distracted by that view, turning away from the conversation just so can stare silently out through the smudged glass. The light coming in from the window seems like it was made for Cas’s face, throwing his profile into sharp relief, turning his eyes this ridiculous, translucent blue. Dean accidentally drips ketchup down his shirt as he stares.

“Only a few more hours until West Wendover,” he points out. “Are we charging in there with the same game plan?”

Jess shrugs. “Near enough. I figure we’ve even got blackmail on the guy, now. Shitbag has been making a regular time out of burgling a few houses every time he comes through California. If he knows that we know that, he’s going to want to cooperate.”

“Hopefully Cyrus wasn’t lying about this Ricky dude’s address,” Dean says.

Cas turns away from the window. “I think he was telling us the truth,” Cas says. “Cyrus seemed to be a good person. I’m sure it’s hard to know a family member is doing something criminally wrong. Maybe it was easier to just turn a blind eye.”

“Or just not let your scumbag cousin spend the night when he’s been stealing from people,” Dean says, but without much heat to it. He is feeling a _little_ bad for throwing Cyrus’s phone into the irretrievable maze of that field. He thinks he must have gotten that idea from a movie, and it had been too good an opportunity to pass up. “Anyways. I’m going to hit the hay, and then we can hit the road. Sound good?”

Soon enough, they’re on the road again. Dean has Jess go sorting through his tape collection and she finds a Bob Dylan tape that hadn’t gotten too much airtime in the past. That’s enough to get them through the next hour or so.

The light is fading by the time they reach town. West Wendover appears like a mirage in the distance, all colorful lights and shapes emerging out the flat, bleak landscape surrounding it. From here it looks like a circus, a carnival, just a confusion of hectic activity. Perhaps the most immediately eye-catching thing is this sixty-something foot tall statue of a smiling cowboy, outfitted in neon lights and a welcoming smile.

“Don’t get to see stuff like that in California, kids,” Dean says admiringly, as they slowly cruise by it. “That’s some small-town USA shit right there!”

Jess holds her phone out the window to take a picture of it.

“That’s—” Dean says, but stops himself. He wants to say, _that’s_ _familiar._ He thinks he might remember it from years ago, from a trip going in the opposite direction, towards California. But somehow it doesn’t feel like the right time to say it, to even call it to mind and make it real for Cas and Jess, too. That’s a different kind of trip than the one they’re on now, one with a different kind of ending.

About ten minutes later, they’re pulling up outside this kind of decrepit home down one of West Wendover’s side streets. It doesn’t look too promising; none of the lights are on. Dean curses under his breath when he notices that.

But there’s nothing for it but to park and walk up the rotting wooden steps, hoping the guy just isn’t a fan of electricity, or something. Dean opens the screen door and knocks loudly a couple of times. In the silence that follows, they wait with bated breath, but there’s nothing on the other side of the door.

“Shit,” Dean mutters. He cups his hands around his eyes to try to peer into the window by the door, but it’s too dark to see anything more than shadows.

“Maybe we can…stake it out,” Cas says. “He might not be home right now.”

“Or this isn’t even where he lives in the first place,” Dean says. He pulls away to rub his hand over the glass, trying to clear away some of the grime.

“Maybe—”

“Can I help you folks with something?” This is a new voice, someone calling over to them from the porch of the house next door. An older man, with his arms folded over his impressively-sized belly. He looks suspicious.

“We’re looking for our friend Ricky,” Dean says, trying to adopt a confident saunter to the edge of the porch closest to the old man. “Have you seen him around?”

“What’s your business with Ricky?”

“The friend kind of business,” Dean says, not letting up.

The man looks the three of them up and down. His eyes linger on Jess, who’s probably doing her best innocent face right now, not that Dean can see it.

With his eyes still on Jess, the man says, “Try Jeppy’s. It’s a bar on the main drag. Ricky normally goes there to unwind after he’s been out of town a few days.”

Dean slaps his hand on the porch post. “ _Jeppy’s_! Why didn’t I think of that? Thanks, man.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jess calls out sweetly. Then they hustle back out to the car.

“Got him now, that sonunva—” Dean says, and then he cranks his key in the engine and the horn starts blasting, making them all jump in surprise. Dean quickly turns the car off again. “What the fuck?” He turns the key again, and the blare immediately starts up.

“What’s wrong with your car?” Cas shouts over the noise. Dean turns the car off.

“I don’t know, it could be—it could be the fuse box, it could be something wrong with the horn—”

“Well, fix it,” Jess says, a little impatiently.

“It takes time!” Dean says. “Also, it’s pitch dark outside, if you haven’t noticed. I can’t just stick my hand in there and find it—”

“Oh my God, stereotypical straight guy talk—”

“Wait, _what_?”

Well, we can’t just sit here and let it go off!” Jess says. She looks like she’s about to claw someone’s eyes out. She starts gesturing out the window. “Look, now that old man’s watching us again, see—”

“Stop pointing at him—”

“Let’s just go,” Cas suggests. “We have bigger things to worry about.”

“What about the—” Dean gestures to the steering wheel. He feels like  he’s sitting in the middle of a tornado siren. But Cas just settles back in his seat with a smile.

“Let it,” Cas says. “Now he know we’re coming.”

Dean raises his eyebrows at Cas in the rearview mirror. Cas is just chilling back there, looking completely unperturbed by the deafening sound of the horn. Who knew Cas was so casually badass? Maybe Cas has been getting ideas from movies, too.

**

You’d better believe that Dean is blasting Led Zeppelin’s _Immigrant Song_ all the way through town, the volume all the way turned up so they can hear it over the never-ceasing wail of the horn. What’s more, cars are moving out of their way quick-time, jumping into other lanes as Dean’s revving engine and sound effects precede him. He pulls into the parking lot of Jeppy’s with gravel spitting away beneath his tires, his headlights bouncing over the assorted patrons sitting on the porch outside, and with his horn still blaring a challenge.

The door _dings_ as Dean steps out without even bothering to shut off the car. He figures he might as well keep their attention. Jeppy’s appears to be one of the grimy local attractions, little more than a shack with a tilted porch that probably isn’t meeting a whole lot of health code standards. Even though it’s a Saturday night, there are only a handful of locals sprawled out over the bar and the porch outside, big-set, rough-looking men, most of which could probably snap Dean in half like a wishbone.

“You wanna turn that racket off, pretty boy?” One of the aforesaid rough-looking men steps down from the porch to loom over Dean menacingly.

“Your name Ricky?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t really care about what you have to say,” Dean says brightly. He goes to step around him but the man puts out a hand and catches Dean on the shoulder, unmovable as a wall.

“You want to run that by me again?”

Another man jumps down from the porch. “Who’s asking for me?” he says. He’s not so big, at least not when compared with the other man. He’s wearing a stained shirt that’s seen better days and a cocky smirk. Even if Dean wasn’t already inclined to hate him, he definitely does now.

“Yeah, how ‘bout a word about one of the laptops you stole yesterday.”

He’s expecting at least surprise, a quick denial. But this fucker just takes a bored sip from the can of beer in his hand. “What about it?”

Dean can’t say when exactly he gave his fist permission to make contact with Ricky’s nose, especially when his back-up is still watching from by the car, but it happened, and Ricky’s stumbling back, hollering, and then the mountain-man with his hand on Dean’s shoulder gets to work on snapping Dean like a wishbone, with two of his cronies jumping down from the porch to help out.

He hears a shout, and then a seriously territorial _hey!_ —Cas’s voice—and then the sounds of someone scuffling nearby, but his face is too busy being smeared into the gravel to really see what’s going on. Then all the sudden the knee on his back lets up and the mountain-man guy is saying, “Whoa, whoa there, little lady.”

Dean pulls himself up onto his elbows. Jess is silhouetted by the headlights from the Impala, holding a tire iron in a way that means business. It’s kind of funny to see the rough-and-tumble lot of men quail before her, backing away. Dean cranes his head around and sees Ricky with his face pinned up against the side of the porch by Cas, who in turn is being held captive in a chokehold from behind. Cas is inexplicably smiling, like a chokehold is the most damn fun he’s ever had in his life.

“Leave my friends alone,” Jess says, in a voice that brooks no arguments.

“Listen, sweetheart, we’re not gonna hurt you, put that down—”

Jess, instead, lifts it up another quarter-inch. “I said, leave my friends alone. And don’t call me sweetheart, either.”

The guy holding Cas in a chokehold backs away, hands up, like the fact Cas can breathe normally now is some kind of magic trick. Mountain-man finally removes his knee from Dean’s ribs.

“No trouble here, see?”

Jess points her tire iron at Ricky. “We don’t want any trouble, either. Just leave us alone with him so we can talk.”

There’s some muttering, but the crowd of men back off. They trudge back onto the porch to watch from there. Jess jogs over and kneels by Dean.

“You okay?”

“Never better,” Dean says. He rubs at his cheek, dislodging some gravel. He can still hear the dull roar of the horn in the background. “I, uh, probably shouldn’t have done that.”

Jess shakes her head. “You’re lucky I was here. Big tough guy bro code says you’re not allowed to lay a finger on a helpless, fragile lady-person. Can’t say it didn’t come in handy.”

Dean coughs out a laugh and stands up, with Jess’s help. “ _Je-_ sus. I’ll be feeling that in the morning.” Together, they walk over to Cas, who’s still casually holding Ricky’s head against the porch siding.

“Dean, your face—”

Dean shakes his head. Scowling, Cas pushes the side of Ricky’s face deeper into the wood, making the guy yelp, before he lets up. Ricky slumps down onto his knees.

“ _Ow_ , man.”

“We want to know where the laptop is,” Dean says. “No funny business. Give it back, and we’ll be on our way.”

Ricky’s eyes dart up to the porch, where his friends have resumed drinking without him. His cocky attitude seems to have left with them. “I—I don’t have it.”

Dean can see, out of the corner of his eye, the way Jess’s shoulders drop, all the fire going right out of her. Cas looks devastated.

“Well, where the fuck is it?”

“It’s—how’d you even find me in the first place?”

Cas steps forward. “Close your eyes,” he says to Jess and Dean solemnly, and then he reaches into his pocket and suddenly has some industrial-looking pepper spray in his hand, leveling it right in front of Ricky’s face. Dean almost lets him do it; it looks pretty badass.

“Hey, hey,” Dean says quickly, catching his arm and pulling him away. He casts a look up at the men still watching from the porch. “Save that for later, okay, hotshot?” Cas grumbles but complies.

Dean crouches down by Ricky, tilting their faces close together. “Ricky, dude, you’re a real piece of shit. And I hope that you know that. So if you don’t mind, I really don’t want to have an extended conversation with you right now. I just spent all day on the road, so I’m pretty tired, and something’s wrong with my car, if you haven’t noticed, and that just does not make me happy. Also, I just had my ass handed to me, and I’m gonna be feeling that for a few days. So do me a fucking favor and tell me where the _hell_ my brother’s laptop is.”

Ricky dabs at his bleeding noise. “Sold it. Took them all to a pawnshop offa I-80.”

“Great. Which one?”

“Grantsville. It’s out east of here—” He flaps his hand in a vague direction. “Pawnshops around here were getting suspicious of where I was getting my merch from, so I had to spread out some more. This place in Grantsville is a bit of a drive—that’s why I only got back a coupla hours ago—but at least he don’t ask questions.”

“Awesome,” Dean says, standing up. “Thanks, asshole. You have a great night.”

“Hey, look, I’m sorry,” Ricky says. “I have a problem, and stealing has this adrenaline high, and I didn’t think anyone would ever find—!” His voice is drowned out by the blare of the Impala as Dean walks away. Once everyone’s inside, he reverses out of the parking lot and they take off, the headlights bouncing over Ricky and the men on the porch and the open door of the bar as they go.

**

They don’t really discuss it, although maybe they should. After they pull into a motel lot (the horn announcing their arrival) and book a room (the front desk receptionist not even blinking at their state of dishevelment), they simply go about preparing for bed. Dean sits on the edge of the mattress and winces as Jess puts her nursing skills to good use, carefully tending to his abraded skin. Besides that and a few bruises, he’s pretty okay. Dean goes to grab a shower when Jess rounds on Cas, who Dean can hear insisting that he’s fine until water drowns out the sounds of their voices.

When he comes out, massaging his wet hair into spikes with his towel, he finds Cas and Jess passed out on one of the beds, sleeping curled towards each other like children. He pulls up the covers over them and then, after setting an alarm for the morning, he crawls into the other bed and falls asleep nearly immediately, the exhaustion of the day dragging him down into the pillow, until the only sounds in the room are their soft snores, mingling together.

**

They don’t discuss it in the morning, either. It’s simply an unsaid agreement that they will continue east—into Utah, towards Grantsville, where Sam’s laptop, as best they know, is sitting in a pawnshop.

Dean wakes up a little earlier than his alarm clock and looks around. Jess is still sleeping, but Cas isn’t in the bed with her anymore. Dean follows the chink of light that comes through the crack of the bathroom door and finds Cas in there, dutifully swallowing his pills. He’s got a line of the motel-supplied plastic cups set across the vanity, with a pill sitting in front of each one. Even as Dean watches, Cas goes down the line with the grace of a seasoned barfly, resting the pill on his tongue, knocking it back with a gulp of water, crumpling up the used cup. When he’s done he wipes his mouth on the inside of his wrist and slides the cups into the trash.

“Mornin’, handsome,” Dean drawls. Cas meets his eye in the mirror.

“Are you a cowboy now, Dean?”

He comes up behind Cas and wraps his arms around his waist, resting his head on his shoulder. “I’m trying to think of a pun…but I haven’t had any coffee yet. Would you still like me if I was?”

“A cowboy?” Cas clarifies. He seems distracted. Dean’s running one of his hands up and down, over Cas’s chest, skimming his thumb up to the hollow of his throat and then down again.

“Mmhmm.”

“I think I’ll always like you, Dean,” Cas says seriously, and Dean gets a front-row seat to watching his own face flush red in the mirror.

“Shit,” he says, hiding his face in Cas’s shoulder. After a few seconds, he pops up again. “I’m going to go figure out what the hell’s up with Baby. Wanna help?”

So that’s how they end up outside in the nearly-deserted motel parking lot, leaned over the Impala’s exposed engine. There’s a bit of a high, cold wind sending trash tumbling across the lot, and raising goosebumps on Dean’s exposed arms, but beyond that the light is good, which is all Dean needs. He lifts his toolbox out of his trunk and brings it around to set by the front wheel.

“So the problem’s either with the horn or the fuse box,” he tells Cas. “Either way, an electrical thing. Hopefully I can either reconnect the wire, or strip it out. Remember what the horn looks like?”

Cas deliberates for a second and then, smiling craftily, taps it.

“You’re a goddamned genius,” Dean informs him proudly.

Dean works mostly in silence, falling into the familiar rhythms he’s used to. He knows Baby’s engine as well as he knows anything else in life—the words to _Back in Black_ , his face in the mirror. There’s something so comforting about working his hands through wires and cool metal, trying to diagnose the problem. Cas leans against the headlight, watching him, watching the sun rise, in perfect contentment.

After a while Dean ducks his head back out, wiping his forehead on the arm of his shirt. He grabs for the toolbox, sifting around for the wrench he wants, and pauses, watching the sky change colors, too.

“I think I drove through here once,” he says. “Almost three years ago, now. It’s when I moved from Kansas.”

Cas cocks his head in Dean’s direction, so Dean knows that he’s listening. Dean slaps the wrench against the palm of his hand, thinking.

“It’s kind of a funny story,” he says. “Sammy and I had been out of touch for a really long time. Years, even.  He left for college and I guess I was hurt, having him leave me behind with Dad. I wouldn’t even say goodbye to him. We were both too stubborn to talk to each other for years. At some point I finally got my shit together, realized how stupid we were being. All I had was an address in Berkeley, so I started writing him.”

He laughs. “I don’t even remember how many letters I sent. He never wrote back to me, but I just kept on writing them, you know, spamming his mailbox. What I _thought_ was his mailbox. Sam had moved into a completely new apartment by then. What ended up happening was the girl who lived there after him, she was gone home for summer break—she also went to Stanford. So she was getting all her mail held. When she got back and saw all those letters addressed to Sam, she went out of her way to ask her landlord if Sam left a forwarding address. I really owe her, you know that? I don’t even know her name. But one day Sammy got, like, months-worth of letters delivered to his doorstep from me. And that’s the day he called home, to tell me he got all my letters.”

Dean feels his eyes prickling, and quickly palms them dry. “ _Almost_ all my letters,” he corrects himself. “He never did get first one. But that’s all right—he got the gist from all the other ones I sent.  After that, letters kinda fell to the wayside. We talked on the phone, and Skyped, and…it was one of the happiest times of my life. Getting to know my brother again. Getting to know how _good_ Sammy turned out to be. It wasn’t much longer after that I decided to pack up and move to California myself. I was sick of us being separated. I was ready to be a family again.”

Cas is looking at him now, almost wistfully. Dean remembers that he isn’t the only one who’s gone for years without talking to family. “You were able to, right?” Cas asks.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I didn’t get as much time as I thought I would. But I still got time.”

**

August 27th, 2012

_H o l y  s h i t Sammy, fucking finally!_

_I still can’t believe it. I almost didn’t answer the phone last night. What a mistake that would have been._

_I hope you still don’t feel bad about the address thing. We weren’t talking—it makes sense why you didn’t think to let me know. I’m just glad to know, now. Jesus, Sammy. An internship? A girlfriend?  A new house? That’s so awesome, man. I’m still smiling about it._

_Okay. I know we can talk through other ways than snail mail now. I was just so happy to finally have your real address. And we’re going to talk tomorrow night, too, once I figure out how that Skype thing works. And maybe we can figure something out, sometime you’re free so I can visit—well, I’m getting ahead of myself. (Three years, Sammy!!!)_

_Dean_

**

The problem is in the fuse box. After that, the only sound that comes out when Dean cranks the key in the ignition is that familiar, rumbling purr. After they drag Jess out of bed, they stop in town for breakfast, and then continue their drive east.

East is Utah, east is Bonneville Flats and the Great Salt Lake Desert. Dean digs out some extra pairs of sunglasses and passes them around the car, because the glare of all that white flat land when the sun hits it is pretty blinding. Somewhere in the distance, the white seems to merge into the blue of the sky, making their destination into some strange, shimmery in-between.

They talk about vacations, the good ones and the bad ones. Dean talks about the time he and Sam drove to Kansas City for a Royals game. He tells them how close they came to almost, _almost_ catching a foul ball, but Sam wasn’t tall then, like he grew to be, and it sailed right over his head. Cas was treated with kid gloves for  most of his childhood after his illness, barely even leaving the house for school, let alone trips. But he tells them about a bible camp on the shores of Pine Lake, which was the most beautiful place in the world until he flew to California for school when he was eighteen. Jess is the only one of them whose been out of the country, detailing smelly but beautiful canals in Venice, swimming with manatees in Honduras. Jess rifles through their supplies and passes around some trail mix—Cas, picking out the raisins with concentrated care, passing the M &Ms up front. They talk until their throats grow tired, and they turn lazy and quiet, introspective, until one of them feels the need to talk again.  

And outside, there’s the cracked, dusty earth of the desert, tiny tectonic plates, like puzzle pieces tiled across miles and miles all around them. It’s a strange land, and it seems like they’re the only ones in it. Dean sees mirages of water in the road ahead, puddles that dry up and disappear, over and over again.

Grantsville is not an undoable drive. They are there in a little over an hour and a half, and then it’s only a matter of minutes before Dean finds the squat, brown building that simply says _PAWNSHOP_ in peeling letters on the window. Jess sighs and smoothes her hand over her shirt.

“I think this is it,” she says. She opens her door first, walking towards the pawnshop with a confidence that Dean isn’t sure she actually feels. Cas and Dean fall into step behind her.

The inside of the business is cramped and dusty, and smells a little bit like a moldy basement. A voice greets them, but it’s not immediately clear where that voice is coming from. Finally, rounding a towering stack of thick books, they come upon this crabby-looking old man sitting on a stool behind the counter. The counter is an absolute mess, overflowing with forms and receipts.

“Engagement rings?” the man says. “Good china? Firearms? What can I help you find?”

Jess places her hands delicately onto the counter. “Laptops, actually.”

A suspicious look comes over the man’s face. He studies Cas, who has this pretty great stone face thing going on, but now that Dean looks, too, he can see how easily Cas could be confused with a fed. Something about that squint. He nudges Cas to get him to lighten up a little.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man says, moving to stand up.

“Please,” Jess says, catching his sleeve. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be—to be some kind of secret. But a guy came here to sell you some laptops the other day, didn’t he? Ricky? Look, I’m not trying to cause trouble—one of them was mine, _my_ laptop. I’m not blaming it on you, or anything. I’m _sure_ you didn’t know. And I’ll buy it off you, too—like I said, no trouble. I just really, really want it back.”

After a long moment, the owner gestures with his head to a curtain behind him. Dean, Cas and Jess uncertainly come around the counter and follow him.

There is a room back here, filled with even more junk, although this stuff is actually from the current century. Laptops, iPods, flat-screen televisions. The man walks to a table and points a finger towards a pile of laptops.

“That’s what came in yesterday,” he says. Jess is darting forward before he’s even finished his sentence, sifting through the contents of the table, lifting laptops off of each other to see beneath. But Dean already knows the truth, even if she’s still frantically searching. Sam’s small, compact Mac isn’t anywhere on the table.

“Have you had any, you know, laptop customers since yesterday?” he asks. He senses this is a delicate situation.

“Maybe,” the man says. “Maybe not.”

“But if the answer is ‘maybe yes,’ is there any way to figure out who bought it?”

“Look,” the man says. His chest seems to swell. “If you think I’m gonna go blabbing my mouth about the customers I’ve got coming through back here—”

Cas pushes his way in front of Dean. “I’m an accountant,” Cas says, in a low, menacing voice. “So give me the name of that customer and, so help me, I’ll settle your books before we go.”

Dean doesn’t think that Cas verbalized the threat in quite the right way. Nonetheless, he and Jess spend the next hour or so perusing the many nooks and crannies of the pawnshop while Cas sits in the owner’s office, sifting through account ledgers and crumpled receipts.

Jess plucks up what looks to be a bonnet from the Civil War era and ties it on under her chin.

“Cute,” Dean says, when Jess bats her eyes provocatively at him. “Look—”

Jess turns away, putting the bonnet back down where she found it, her hands dancing over other odds and ends.

“Jess.”

“What?”

“I just…” he says. He wants to prepare her, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to be the person who has to do that. Jess turns around and looks at him, remarkably calm.

“I know, Dean,” she says. “This long-shot just keeps getting longer. It’s a wish and a prayer right now, and at some point we are going to have to go home, whether we find it or not. Believe me, I know that.” Then she reaches up and puts a crown on Dean’s head, carefully tilting it to just the right direction. “Looking good, Winchester.”

Dean puts one hand onto the crown to steady it. “I’m willing to go as far as you want to go, Jess,” he says. “I’ll go all the way to fucking Iran if I have to—”

“Thank you for that,” Jess says. “I’m so glad I don’t have to do this alone. Seriously. Now hold still for a second, please.” She lifts her phone to capture Dean in all his crowning glory.

Dean’s testing out a rusted saber he found down a side aisle when Cas finds him. He looks a little shell-shocked, and he’s holding a piece of paper tightly in his hand.

“I got an address,” Cas tells him. “He has everyone who buys something in his store sign a ledger with their name and address. So here we have…John Smith, who lives at 918 Main Street in Cheyenne.”

“…John Smith,” Dean repeats.

“Yes,” Cas says heavily.

What else could Dean expect at this point? The trail from Berkeley to here has stretched as thin as a wire, liable to snap at any moment. But he knows Jess’s stance, and he knows his own, and Cas’s face is determined and serious. They will chase this longest of long-shots, because at some point it stopped being a question of possibility, anyhow.

**

Led Zeppelin on repeat, and a sky filled with more stars than Dean’s seen since he was a kid. Ink-black road, and the hum of the tires on it, and the sad nostalgic feeling of his  headlights lighting up dusty, broken-down signs advertising businesses that don’t exist anymore. They make it into Wyoming before they have to stop for the night. At a diner off of Route 80, they collapse into a sticky booth and immediately swarm over the menus. Dean’s filled with a happy kind of lethargy, hearing the twangs of country music coming over the jukebox, the _ding_ of a bell from the kitchen every time an order’s up. Their waitress is a kindly older woman who keeps the coffee hot and coming, and Jess is dancing in her seat unconsciously to the music, and Cas is warm and solid next to him, holding Dean’s hand on his thigh like he likes to.

“Do you _like_ math?” Jess asks Cas. “Because that could really play into getting a job in the same ball-park or not.”

“Math makes sense to me,” Cas shrugs. “But logic, numbers…I don’t necessarily get enjoyment out of it.”

“That’s fair,” Jess says. “You know, nursing wasn’t my first choice, either. I initially went to Stanford for communications, but once it got down to the nitty-gritty, I realized that’s not what I wanted to do.  Lack of interest was leading to me failing classes.”

Cas looks relieved. “I didn’t know that,” he says.

“It is weird how we don’t talk about those kinds of failures,” Jess says. “I’m so happy with nursing now that I don’t really think about it. But seriously, Cas, try out as many things as you want to. See what you’re passionate about. You owe it to yourself to find out. Accounting might just turn into something you did, once, when you were trying to figure it out.”

“Maybe you could take some classes or something,” Dean suggests.

“Ooh!” Jess says. “Cas, you totally should. Just cast a wide net, you know?”  Cas beams as Jess starts rattling off an assorted list of different majors having nothing to do with accountancy.

Dean and Jess order a slice to pie to share between themselves—apple-blueberry, with that perfect crumbly crust that comes apart like butter in his mouth.

“Oh my God, that’s delicious,” Jess says, stabbing for one of the last bites. Dean makes some kind of moaning noise in agreement. Cas, who’s sitting on the inside of the booth, nudges Dean’s leg so he can get out.

“I can take care of the bill,” he murmurs.

“You wanna taste?” Dean teases, and drops a kiss onto Cas’s mouth, who makes a surprised noise when Dean’s apple-blueberry flavored tongue slides alongside his. Dean gives him a nice, lush sample, sucking on Cas’s bottom lip as he draws away, which makes Cas stumble a bit. “All right. We’ll finish up here and meet at the car, okay?”

“Okay,” Cas says, who smiles goofily and then turns around and almost runs into a waitress passing by with a loaded tray.

Dean drops down into the booth across from Jess again. Honestly, he’d thought nothing of kissing Cas, and he’s all too willing to play it cool, but Jess is beaming at him from the other side of the table now, and he’s really not sure if he’s prepared for the conversation she’s probably dying to have. “So…” he says, idling his fork along the edge of the plate.

“This is so great for you two,” Jess says. She puts her hand over his, stilling the movement of his fork. “Honestly I wasn’t sure if you’d ever let yourself have that…oh, man, I’m gonna cry…”

She starts smiling and tearing up at the same time, which is not something Dean is well-equipped to deal with.

“I know it might seem really…fast,” Dean says. “I mean, I’ve only known the guy for five months. And, you know, we talked about how the whole situation is a little, well, a _lot_ —”

“Sam and I moved in together after five months,” Jess says. “And the situation is _great_. I’m just, I’m just so _happy_.”

“Yeah?” Dean says. He’s surprised by how anxious his voice comes out sounding. But he knows, and has known, how irretrievably wrapped up in this Jess is.

“I knew for sure that day after Cas came for dinner,” Jess says. “You’d been so awkward and weird about him before, not to mention you normally avoided my place like the plague, never staying too long if you did come over. But that day I came downstairs and the two of you were in the kitchen, making all this food, and—Dean, you were just _glowing._ I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen you like that, and Cas brought it out in you so easily.”

Jess grips his hand tighter. “Did Sam ever tell you about when we started dating? You know, I’d seen him around, we had some mutual friends, and I thought he was attractive, but nothing really happened. And then there was this one night where my roommates had a party, and someone left the door open and my cat got out. Everyone was too drunk to care, no one could hear me over the music, and I was seriously on the verge of a panic attack. And then Sam was there, and he took me outside and calmed me down until he could see what the problem was. We spent hours walking the streets that night, trying to find her. He came over the next day, too, to see if she had come back. And I probably looked like a wreck, because she still hadn’t—and I’d brought that cat with me from home, I’d had her for years, so I was devastated. And he made me sit down on the couch while he finished all the clean-up from the party, and then he started telling me all those funny stories. A lot of them were about growing up—a lot of them were about you, actually. He made me laugh.”

They haven’t talked about Sam, really _talked_ about Sam, in such a long time.

 “Everyone deserves that,” Jess says. “Everyone deserves someone who can make them happy, even when they’re so fucking sad.”

Jess knows, and she has known, that Dean had feelings for Cas.  Of course she must have realized that Dean wasn’t sure how to talk to her about that.  It must have taken patience, waiting for a Winchester to stop being stubborn and be ready to talk.  And she’s giving him _this_ , now, a happiness that is its own kind of blessing, and Dean loves her for it, he really does.

**

Another night at a motel, although this time Jess requests two rooms, passing one of the key cards over to Dean with a smirk.

Cas seems nonplussed until they reach the room and Dean in turn reaches for Cas, bearing him down into the bed as they kiss. Eventually they start losing some clothing—shoes kicked off, belts undone. Dean stands up to step out of his jeans and, while he’s there, helps Cas out of his, too. He runs his hands up and down Cas’s thighs, and Cas watches him and his breath hitches whenever Dean’s fingers stray close to the growing bulge in his boxers.

Dean’s hands slide up to Cas’s stomach, plucking at the material of the shirt. “Can I—?”

Cas’s eyes are wide, but he nods. He sits up a little to help Dean pull the shirt over his head. Dean tosses the shirt onto the floor and just looks, for a moment. The scar bisecting Cas’s chest starts in the dip of his clavicle and travels down, between his nipples, to just before where his stomach hollows out. It is a pink, smooth line, this scar. It is clean and shallow. It is, Dean thinks, a miracle.

Dean leans forward to touch it, wonderingly, and Cas’s hand comes up and grabs his, stalling him.

“It’s, it’s okay—” Cas says. But Dean pushes Cas’s hand out of the way and kisses it, instead, mouthing his way from tip to tip, gently as he can, and Cas shudders all over.

Sometime in all of that, the lights get fumbled off, the rest of their clothes removed. Dean props a pillow beneath Cas’s hips, smoothes his thighs open. Dean goes slowly, calmly—he wants this to last, and Cas is already half undone, his cock hard and curved up against his stomach, still shivering from Dean’s kisses. He presses the lube-slick tip of his thumb into Cas, just gentle pressure, working the wetness just inside the rim. By the time he’s progressed to two fingers to the knuckle, Cas’s legs have closed like a vise around his head.

“PleaseDeanplease,” Cas gasps. “It’s so good, _ah_ , good—” he cuts off as Dean pushes his legs open again, opening him up for Dean to nose up over his cock before taking the head into his mouth. He just keeps it there, twitching on his tongue, as he works his fingers in and in again, getting Cas all stretched and full and desperate. He crooks a finger just right and Cas throws his arms up over his head lets out a long, whining breath.

At long last he pulls away to slick a condom on and then he’s there, kneeling between Cas’s legs, slowly pushing into him. It’s unbearably good. He bottoms out and stays there, loving the heat and pressure, loving Cas’s hands trembling on his back, pulling him closer. He reaches down between them and gently pets over Cas’s swollen rim, feeling where it gives way to the press of him. Cas jolts at the touch.

“This okay?” Dean asks, blinking sweat from his eyes. “You good?”

Cas blows out a long breath and brackets Dean’s hips with his knees, drawing him in, an invitation.

They make love with the light through the window spilling over them, with Dean curling down to press kisses over Cas’s face and chest and scar. Cas’s hands smooth down over the bow of his back and then to Dean’s ass, holding him there, where he must feel the muscles dimple and flex with each thrust. Dean slips out by accident and gets his knees underneath him, pushing Cas’s legs higher, and feeds himself back in by the slow inch— _“ah_ , Dean, _Dean”_ —his body close against Cas’s, moving up him like a wave, sinuous. Dean can feel his stomach dragging slickly over Cas’s hard length every time he works his hips home, can hear Cas whisper his name on every pass. They’re tight together as can be, all pressure and heat, and each hot slide into Cas is like bliss.

 Cas’s hot hand coming over the back of his neck, holding Dean there to his chest. There is nothing separating them, Dean thinks, lost in the warmth and wildness of it. No fear or irrationalities, no thought to what should be, what others might think. Nothing will separate them, ever again, they will always be like this, skin to skin. He digs his knees into the mattress and _pushes_ , until the only sound in the room is the fleshy slap of his balls against Cas’s skin. He knows when he finds Cas’s prostate because Cas lets out a wail that only grows in volume as his legs and arms seize up around Dean, crying out as Dean tags against it with every roll of his hips, fucking him through his orgasm.

Cas falls back onto the mattress, gasping. He’s limp and boneless, his legs falling wide, but he keeps his grip on the back of Dean’s neck, tenderly running his fingers through Dean’s sweaty hair. Dean drops his head down onto Cas’s chest and rolls his hips in tight, short thrusts until he’s coming. Every muscle in his body comes undone with his white-hot release, until he’s just shallowly pulsing into Cas, hearing Cas’s soft groans rumble in his chest.

In a while he will pull out of Cas, throw away the condom. He will wet a hand towel and run it all over Cas’s hot skin. He will kiss every inch of Cas’s newly-revealed  flesh, he will revel in it, something that has less to do with the wild heat of only minutes before, just a kind of knowing, a recognition, that he needs to have. Cas will give that to him, too. Cas will probably fall asleep as he does, lulled by the gentle care of Dean’s ministrations. But first he wants to stay here a few seconds more, as close as he can get, hearing Cas’s heartbeat slowly return to  normal.

**

Dean wakes up early and slips out of bed, indiscriminately slipping on whatever clothing he finds on the floor. Cas is only half-visible, a naked shoulder, wild hair, face turned into the pillow. Dean tucks the sheet higher around his neck and then quietly pads to the door. Outside, standing in the shadow of the motel, he calls work.

“Bobby’s garage, this is Andy speaking—”

“Hey, Andy, can you get Bobby on the line for me?”

He knows it’s a Monday morning, that he should be there right now. Caught up in this quest to get the laptop back, his job had really taken backburner. He hopes Bobby isn’t too pissed. Someone picks up the phone, but it isn’t his boss.

“Where you been?” Garth demands. “We’ve been worried about you.”

“It’s a long story,” Dean sighs. “Someone broke into Jess’s house—”                             

“Hold up,” a new voice says. It’s Tracy—they must have him on speaker phone. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she’s fine. But some of her stuff got lifted, including her laptop, which we were able to track for a while, so we’re trying to get it back. I’m in Wyoming right now.”

“That’s _badass_ ,” Garth says. “I’ve never been to Wyoming.”

Dean’s eyes track over the mountains in the distance, like smudges of watercolor. “Yeah, well, we’re no closer to getting it. So I wanted to let you guys know it might be another day or two before I get back. Sorry for the short notice.”

“You know what,” Garth says, “take your time. This is important. More important than work, for sure. Tracy and Andy and I, we’ll cover your shifts. Uh. I mean, only if you guys want to. I’m not gonna speak for—”

“No, I totally agree,” Tracy says. Garth makes a surprised sound. “You should do what you need to, Dean. We’ll hold down the fort over here.”

“Did you hear that, Dean? Tracy agreed with _me_.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Dean says. “So, uh, thanks, guys. I really, really appreciate it.”

Bobby’s gruff voice comes over the line. He sounds put-upon, like normal. “Geez, kid, you’ve built up over three weeks of vacation,” he says. “Take all the time you need.”

**

There are canyons on the way to Cheyenne, dramatic bluffs and steep cliffs colored rosy-gold in the sunlight. The Impala is dwarfed by the shadows they cast. Jess hangs out the window, snapping pictures. Cas sleeps in the back, slumped against the window with his mouth half-open, wearing one of Dean’s shirts.

Jess sits back in her seat and thumbs over the pictures on her phone. The window is still open, her hair blowing through it, squinting down at the screen.

“You’ve been taking a lot of pictures lately,” Dean says.

“Yeah, it’s…” Jess begins. “Well. They’re kind of meant to replace the ones I lost.”

Dean shifts in his seat. “We’re not _sure_ —” he says.

Jess gives him a wry look. “I know it was only a few days ago, but when I lost that laptop, it felt like I was losing Sam. Just because so much _proof_ of us was saved up on there. But, you know, that’s just life, right? Someday I’m going to forget exactly what his cologne smells like. Or the color of his eyes. But even with that, and even with the pictures gone, it’s going to be okay.”

“Yeah?” Dean says.

“Yeah. I know you know.”

Dean does, even though it’s still early in the game. He’s learned how it’s going to go. He loses pieces of Sam before he even realizes he’s lost them; it’s only later, when he’s trying to remember why Sam was driving to the store that night he was killed, or what he was wearing when they saw each other for the first time again in California—it’s only then he realizes there are chinks in his memory, that he can’t stop them from happening.

But that’s okay. Because then there are some days where he’s hit with a memory out of nowhere, like a beam of sun sliding into his brain, and he suddenly remembers something that he hasn’t thought about in years. That time Sam and him went drunk-kayaking in Tahoe and capsized, bobbing around in their life vests and giggling until Jess helped them right the boat. That time Sam was helping him find a house in Berkeley and, upon clearing the seven-foot front doorway, announced dramatically, “ _This_ is the one.” Dean doesn’t know why he forgot those moments, but he doesn’t mind. They seem so new, so fresh and vivid, unlike those ones he’s reminisced about time and time again. It’s almost like they happened only five minutes before, and Dean hopes that happens for the rest of his life, stumbling upon some memory that makes him feel like he was just with his brother, like Sammy only just walked out of the room.

Dean knows a thing or two about loss—he’s lost Sam before, lost him for years. And Dean knows he’s going to be okay.

“Let me see some of those pictures,” he says. Jess slides over what she’s got so far, which is more than Dean initially realized. The highway in California, Cyrus’s house, the cowboy statue in West Wendover. There’s their dirty plates on the diner table, and Cas grinning in the back seat, and Dean with a crown on his head. It’s a start.

“You’ve gotta have some pictures with you in them, too,” Dean says. So Jess turns her phone around and captures the three of them in the flash—Cas sleeping and Dean driving and Jess, Jess smiling, with the rosy-gold colors of Wyoming coming in bright through the windows.

**

“Maybe just one of us should go up,” Dean says. “This guy might not even know he bought a stolen laptop. We don’t have to gang up on him.”

“Or maybe he knows _exactly_ what he did,” Cas says ominously. “Maybe we need to do…good cop, bad cop.”

“And you’re what? Bad cop?” Dean says, meeting Cas’s eye in the mirror. “Mister, ‘so help me, I’ll settle your books for you?’”  Cas frowns at him.

“ _I’ll_ go up,” Jess says, unbuckling. “You two stay in here.”

It’s late afternoon in Cheyenne. The Impala’s parked on the side of the street, engine off and making ticking noises as it settles, and up in front of them is 918 Main Street, a cheery yellow house with a rooster windvane on the roof.

Dean and Cas watch from the car as Jess smoothes her hair and walks confidently up the front steps. They can hear the muffled sounds of her knocking. While she waits, she looks around the porch, taking in the flower pots and the mailbox, and she looks over her shoulder at the car before turning back. Then the door opens, and a young woman with a baby on her hip is standing there. So Dean watches as Jess gestures towards herself, how she uses her hands to talk, gesturing west towards the direction they came from, how the woman seems confused and shakes her head. He watches as Jess says something, her shoulders dropping, and the lady giving a sympathetic smile as she responds. He watches as Jess shakes the woman’s hand, thanking her, before turning back towards them, hands empty. And that’s when Dean knows.

**

When Jess slides back into the car, she sits there very still for a few long moments.

“No one named John Smith has ever lived there,” she says. “The name on the mailbox even says _The Millers.”_ She heaves a long sigh.

“So,” Dean says. He can’t seem to think of what to say after that.

He never thought, not really, that they could get the laptop back. He probably knew that days ago, when Charlie called to say that it was switched offline. As soon as it went off the grid, they had lost it, even if they weren’t willing to admit yet. The pictures had probably been deleted off of it, along with everything else as it got wiped clean and passed on to someone else. Dean and Jess, they’ve prepared themselves for the fact that the laptop is good and gone. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt any less.

And yet, he’d always felt like they were driving towards something. That there was an end destination on the horizon, even if he hadn’t realized it at the beginning. It’s seemed like the obvious route for a while now. So maybe Dean’s not ready to go back just yet—there’s still one place left to go.

Dean isn’t the kind of person who puts things down to faith, to destiny. In fact, he tends to find that kind of thinking to be bullshit. It’s a cop-out, at least in Dean’s lived experience. He doesn’t want to believe in some grand plan, leading him by the nose through mountains and canyons. There can’t be a _point_ to this, that Jess has lost so much and just lost still more.  There shouldn’t have to be a _lesson_. But shouldn’t Dean also have a say?

Dean has always been happiest when he’s surrounded by the people he loves best. God knows that kind of thinking has fucked him over a few times. He and Cas and Jess, he knows how hard they’ve tried. They’ve trespassed and started bar fights and charmed their way into illegal pawnshop merchandise. They’ve lied and bickered and patched each other up again. And he can’t feel like it’s the end of the road yet, he can’t, not when he’s just been finding his footing again. There’s something still left for them. There’s something they still need to see. There’s still a small way to get Sam back, and he knows—thanks to Cas, he does—that a small way can be better than nothing at all.

“We’re almost halfway there, you know,” he says. He studies his hands on the steering wheel. Dean can’t tell what the others are thinking, if they’re ready to admit defeat and head home. Jess lifts her head to look at him, waiting.

“Kansas,” he says.

**

Lawrence, Kansas. It’s still a bit of a drive away.  But there is no urgency anymore. They take their time.

They loop through Colorado along the I-70 corridor, where endless green hills of evergreens give way to the high points of mountains, peaked in snow. They are beautiful, these mountains. Dean pulls over at a lookout and they pose for a picture together, putting Jess’s phone on self-timer so they can arrange themselves looking out over the ridges and valleys in suitable awe.

“Take one of us,” Jess demands, pulling Cas under her arm. The camera flashes as Cas is trying to push her hair from his face, sputtering.

“Now one of us,” Dean says, equally pushy, and wraps his arms around Cas from behind, his chin bumping into the back of Cas’s hair. A semi roars by and sends a warm wind blasting over them, forcing Dean’s eyes closed, and he finds he has to keep them closed a second longer.

 They stop for the night in Denver, wandering up and down the trafficked streets, unused to the bustle of people after three days on the road. They find a restaurant with an outdoor patio and while away the time until dark, watching the lights begin to turn on all around them.

“Vermont,” Cas says. “I hear the leaves are beautiful in the fall.”

“Of course you’d want to see _leaves_ , you nerd,” Dean says. He squeezes Cas’s knee. “How about some love for Louisiana, huh? Get our Gras on, wrestle a few gators.”

“We should go in May,” Jess says, stabbing a piece of Cas’s chicken with her fork. “A yearly  kind of thing. Someplace where we haven’t gone before.” She brings her fork up to her mouth and pauses. “We haven’t even _talked_ about going outside of the US yet.”

“Here we go,” Dean says, and looks around for the waiter to bring the dessert menu.

Tuesday morning, Dean wakes up wrapped around Cas, his knees knocking into the backs of Cas’s, and he starts the day off right, dipping his hand down over the flat of Cas’s belly and into his boxers, wringing a slick, shuddering orgasm out of him, his chin hooked over Cas’s shoulder to watch. After showering together and  regrouping with Jess to snag a bite to eat from the complimentary breakfast at the hotel, they hit the road.

It’s like the years peel away as Dean drives east, into the familiar flat landscape of Kansas. The mountains recede in the rearview mirror and he starts telling them stories. Driving out to the middle of the prairie, him and Sam, sitting on the hood and watching a meteor shower overhead. The fields of sunflowers. The _real_ barbeque joints, like Oklahoma Joe’s and Gate’s, that they’d go to some weekends for a special treat, Dean dishing out his pocket money so that Sam could eat himself sick on baby back ribs.

Jess listens to it all, wondrous and silent, pressing her fingers against the glass as she looks out over Kansas, seeing Sam in every place they pass. Dean can’t seem to stop himself from talking—Sam, Sam, Sam. Jess and Cas seem to like it, though, like knowing this side of Sam that only Dean ever saw.

They stop at a gas station outside of Topeka to use the bathroom and stretch. Dean watches as Jess idles inside, looking over snacks in the aisle as the man working behind the counter talks to her. Cas, who’s been busy working a kink out of his back, comes to stand beside him.

“Are you glad to be back, Dean?”

Dean rests his arm alongside Cas’s. “I’m not really sure. It’s been such years since I’ve been here…I feel sad. But also happy at the same time. Ever get that feeling?”

“Of course,” Cas says. He turns his face up to the sun, basking in the shine like he’s some kind of cat, and it gives Dean a chance to look him over. Somehow going on four days in the car, crunched in the back seat, sleeping in motels, has had a rejuvenating effect on Cas. He looks the most well-rested he’s been since Dean first met him. He looks like someone who belongs right where he is. Dean shakes his head and settles back against the car and tilts his face up to the sun, too.

Lawrence has subtly changed since Dean was last here, like new wrinkles in the face of someone you haven’t seen in years. He points out the new library and the strip malls that have popped up since he moved. They pass the high school, where Sam was valedictorian, and he points out the neighborhood grocery store where Sam got his first job at sixteen. One place in Lawrence, though, seems to be relatively unchanged—the street he grew up on. Dean’s throat seems to close up as he turns down it, passing house after house until he comes to a stop in front of the most familiar house of all.

God, Dean feels an ache in his chest just looking at it. He’s been to a lot of homes, lately—Jess’s, with Sam’s toothbrush still in the sink and his shoes in the closet, and Cas’s house with the vase of flowers and the stained glass window in the attic. There was Cyrus’s house with his fields of wheat, and Ricky’s with the dirty windows, and the cheery yellow house where John Smith didn’t live. This house here isn’t necessarily better or worse than any of the other ones. In fact, it’s kind of nondescript. But somehow everything about it, from the front door to the sloping lawn to the leaky hose pipe on the side, can fill Dean with memories, hundreds of them. He looks and looks until his eyes feel full from looking.

He clears his throat. “You guys wanna, uh, take a look around?”

So they do. They climb out of the car and go exploring, Cas looking with interest up and down the street, watching kids playing hopscotch a few houses down with a small smile. He turns back to regard the house, and Dean turns too, just to try to see what Cas is seeing this first time. Jess is snooping around in a small, overgrown vegetable garden, which Mary had once tended to so carefully, and Dean’s so busy watching them that he doesn’t notice the woman that comes out on the porch right away.

“Can I help you?” she calls. She doesn’t sound angry, at least, although she does seem confused why the three of them are wandering around her lawn like overgrown children. He jumps up the stairs onto the porch, holding out a hand.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he says. “My name’s Dean Winchester—I actually used to live here, and we happened to be driving through and I wanted to show them what my childhood home looked like. We can get out of your hair, I promise.”

The woman takes his hand, shaking it, but she seems to be trying to remember something, squinting at him up and down. Finally, her face clears up. “Come inside for a moment,” she says. “I have something for you.”

Dean casts a look back at Cas and Jess, shrugging, and steps inside after the woman. The house doesn’t smell like his house anymore. There’s some kind of synthetic air freshener, lilacs or something, but even beyond that, it just doesn’t smell like it’s supposed to. He looks around at the furniture arranged in different patterns than he’s used to, trying to find something that’s the same. On the wall by the stairs, Mom used to measure their heights every birthday, but the wall has since been painted over. He trails his fingers over it as he passes.

The woman is rifling through a messy drawer of papers, her back to Dean.

“Got it a couple of months ago,” she says. “Just stuffed it in here—was thinking about throwing it out, to be honest, but I would have felt bad about that. And then you show up, like it’s meant to be—”

“Sorry, got what?” Dean says, but then she turns around and has something in her hand, held out towards him, and his mouth dries right up. Silently, he reaches out and takes it. It’s been through hell and back, this letter. Crumpled around the edges, slightly yellowed, and the flap is half busted up, although no one’s actually opened it from what he can tell. The ink has faded a bit, too, but he can still see what it says. In bright red pen, someone’s crossed out the address on the front and written RETURN TO SENDER.

Dean turns it over and over in his hands. “I sent this over three years ago,” he says.

The woman huffs out a laugh. “Honestly, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve heard of letters getting lost in the mail, returning home two decades after the fact. US postal service for you.  I guess you can consider yourself lucky it was only a few years, huh?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, dazed. “Lucky.” After a few seconds he shakes his head and looks up at the woman. “I just—” he says. “Thank you. Seriously. I’m not sure if you know what this means. Thank you.”

Dean thinks he might shake her hand goodbye, that he might have even hugged her.  He really can’t quite remember. He just knows when he comes stumbling out of the house, blinking at the sunlight, Cas and Jess are sitting on the hood of the Impala, their heads tilted close together, talking softly as they wait.

Dean doesn’t know what is going to happen next, not that he has for a very long time. He only realized today, watching Jess smile at the gas station clerk, that she has her own life to live. Jess will probably start dating again at some point, weeks or years from now, who knows. Cas, who quit his job, is going to have to figure out what he wants to do next, what kind of person he wants to be. They can’t stay like this forever, the three of them taking off without responsibilities or deadlines, driving halfway across the country because they thought they should. Nothing is for certain, then. Nothing is guaranteed.

He walks down the lawn towards them.

“What’d she give you?” Jess asks.

“It’s a letter.”

“What kind of letter?” Cas easily moves aside to make room for Dean in the middle of them.

Dean smiles. Maybe, though, if you’re lucky, some things are.

He rips open the letter, clears his throat, and reads it aloud.

**

July 1st, 2012

_Hey, Sammy._

_I know we haven’t talked in a long time. And I know that’s my fault, too. But I’d rather just get straight to the facts, so there are no misunderstandings anymore._

_I miss you, man. So fucking much. And now that it’s been a while I can start thinking of other ways it could have gone—if I had only said this, if only you hadn’t left for another day or two. But since you are gone, I’m just trying to figure out a way to make it not permanent._

_Remember when you were little, after Mom died, and Dad basically made me take care of you? I probably complained more than I should have, but I was little, too. And then after a little while he went the opposite way. He said we were spending too much time together, that he wanted tough strong boys and we were getting too dependent on each other. So he’d find ways to split us up. He’d make me go rake leaves, and he’d make you clean up our room, little chores turning into hours-long chores, just to keep us apart. It never really worked, did it? We’d always find a way. You would stand at the bedroom window and wave at me down on the lawn—just waving and smiling, just to remind me you were there._

_I hope you remember things like that. I hope you remember that even though I wasn’t there for you, even though I didn’t say goodbye, that there were enough signs to show that I love you. I’m saying it now, even though it should be obvious—I love you, and I’m proud of you, and if you wanted a sign, wanted to find a way, this is it, okay?_

_It’s been years. A lot has happened._

_Jesus, Sammy, I can’t wait to tell you all about it._

**

**Author's Note:**

> As a DCBB virgin, this was mildly terrifying. 
> 
> Art credit to the wonderful and lovely and funny and immensely talented kt (meerkt.tumblr.com) I think I love you after all of this. (But for real she's amazing and so is her art!)
> 
> paperclothesline.tumblr.com


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